


Blackwood Investigations

by artefact_storage, WhyNotFly



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Noir, Dangerously sexy and flirty but still ace Jon, Eventual Happy Ending, Eventual Jon/Martin/Elias, Femme Fatale Jon, Here lies over the top dramatic noir monologues, M/M, Martin Blackwood first person POV, References to Sex
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-22
Updated: 2020-12-05
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:06:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 22,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24858856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/artefact_storage/pseuds/artefact_storage, https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhyNotFly/pseuds/WhyNotFly
Summary: Martin Blackwood is an up and coming junior reporter for the Daily Thread.  Jonathan Bouchard is the notorious husband of this city’s biggest crime boss.  He’s bad news wrapped in a red dress and topped off with lipstick, but he’s also Martin's only lead on the mysterious murder of Ms. Gertrude Robinson.Martin’s booked himself a one way ticket on this runaway train.  The only stop now is thetruth.
Relationships: Elias Bouchard/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 46
Kudos: 121





	1. Martin Blackwood and the Scarlet Archivist

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to the discord crew for all their help with worldbuilding and plot and editing and cheerleading and the million other things they did that I could not have made this story happen without. Y'all rock.

The rain in this city gets worse every day. Some folks say it’s the climate, they think the end of the world is just around the corner, and maybe it is, but if so then armageddon’s hitting here first. The rain is just the icing on the rotten cake. When rapture time comes, I wouldn’t be shocked if this whole city sinks on down to hell. Don’t get me wrong, I love this city like a baby loves car keys. It’s flashy, distracting, and makes a lot of noise. But when you grow up here, like I did, you learn it’s real useful for a lot of things. For one, plenty of decent folks live here. Just ordinary people trying to get through their ordinary lives under the heel of the rich and powerful families who run this place.

They’re the real problem, the crime syndicates who barely even lurk in the shadows any more. They could get away with murder. And I think they have.

My name’s Martin Blackwood. I’m a junior reporter for The Daily Thread. I’ve never let a bit of wealth and influence keep me from getting to the truth of things, and I’ve never given up on a story before. Partially because I’ve only had the one before this and it was an expose on the local high school science fair, but I know I have a knack for this business. And I’ve sniffed out a story that’s going to put me on the map.

Gertrude Robinson. A hell of a dame. Or she was, at least, rest her soul in peace. She was something of a vigilante, no one knew who she was working for and she seemed to be real big on equal opportunity mayhem against all the major players of this city. Some real illegal stuff, too. I still remember listening to the radio coverage of the fallout of the Lukas fundraiser gala bombing in my kitchen with my mother. Didn’t think it sounded like a win back then, but now? Well. It’s not for me to judge. I’m just here for the truth.

Either way, Gertrude disappeared suddenly a few years back and none of the powerful families she’d made her business of disrupting had anything enlightening to say about the matter. Coppers ruled her deceased from a heart attack, which normally wouldn’t be too suspicious, considering she was pushing 80, if the bribe hadn’t been so recent that you could still smell the scent of ripped checks lingering in the air around them. That and they never recovered a body. Which made it pretty hard to conduct an autopsy.

That is, they didn’t recover the body ‘til today. Some kids found it while playing in the sewers under the city, surrounded by cassette tapes, dead by three bullets to the chest. Not your traditional symptom of a peaceful heart attack. Someone murdered her, and I’d bet my reporter’s badge it’s someone linked to the powerful families who love keeping this city under their collective thumbs. They all have a motive. The question is who. 

I flick open the shades of my office blinds to watch the endless drizzle drip down my window. For how much they get washed, the rain only ever seems to move the dust around. I have a pencil pusher cubicle down at the Daily Thread, but all my real work gets done here, at home, with my decaying old desk and green corduroy couch. Can’t think right without the air smelling like mildew. Tim thinks I should spend less time on the job, but if the stories won’t sleep, then I can’t either. Whoever killed Gertrude Robinson won’t face justice unless they’re forced into the light. I have plenty of evidence, and a prolific list of suspects, but I’m not sure where to start with it all. Each family has at least as big a grudge as the next, and most of them are private enough, and rich enough, that it will take more than moxie and elbow grease to get an interview.

I’m knee-deep in troubled thoughts when I spot an entirely different kind of trouble walking my way. I’ve never had the misfortune of meeting him in person, but I listen to enough backstreets chatter to recognize that body anywhere. Even from my office I can see the streetlights glinting off the gigantic diamonds in his choker. Just one of those could probably pay my rent on this dingy place from now til I kick the bucket. I let the blind drop and hurry to clear the scattered muffin crumbs off my desk before he makes it inside.

He doesn’t knock. I suppose he knows I saw him coming.

Of course I'd heard of Jonathan Bouchard. Everyone in this godforsaken city has. They call him the Archivist. Say if you do anything, he's the guy who knows. He and his husband Elias Bouchard, they have eyes all over this city. Can't spit on the sidewalk without them knowing about it. But for all I'd heard, guess I wasn't ready for the day he walked into my office. He was wearing a red backless dress with slits all the way up, and had the legs to carry it. Dark skin and tousled black hair like an oil slick. I knew I was in trouble when I saw those eyes though. They went on forever, and deep inside them I could see myself doing anything to see what that pretty mouth of his looked like smiling. Damn. 

“Do you mind if I come in, Mr. Blackwood?”

I fold my arms, trying in vain to keep the blush off my cheeks. He isn’t even in my office yet and I already want to fold like a house of cards. “I suppose a pretty thing like you isn’t used to people saying no much, huh.”

Jon lifts his shoulders and lets them drop in the smoothest imitation of a shrug I’ve ever seen. “Were you planning on saying no?”

“Depends what you’re here for, I suppose.” I step around to the front of my desk and lean back against it, trying to project confidence, but Jon’s eyes say he’s come up against far better men than me and won every time.

“I heard you were looking into the now-unsolved murder of Gertrude Robinson.”

“And how would you know something like that?” I ask with a grim smile. It’s not like I don’t already know the answer, but sometimes the dance is done for its own sake. “Or where I live, for that matter?”

“It’s the business of the Magnus Family to know things,” Jon says, and apparently sensing that no rejection was coming, or maybe just not caring if it was, he steps fully into my office and perches daintily on the edge of my old green corduroy couch. 

The Magnus Family is one of what I consider the big three crime families in the city. Magnus, Lukas, and Fairchild. The Fairchild family is rather classic, crime for the sake of it and the profit, some corrupt bookkeeping but mostly smuggling, murders, and black market dealings. Only problem is, no one ever caught them at it. The Lukas family is more insidious, they run this city in the most literal way there is: politics. Doesn’t mean they aren’t greasing palms and disappearing problems behind the scenes, but it’s hard to make anything stick to their pristine public image. And finally, the Magnus Family. Some would say the worst of them all. Their business is information. The kind of information folks get killed over. They run the prestigious Magnus Library, and it’s a laughably flimsy cover for a wealth of money laundering schemes that just hammers in how corrupt the police force of this city is. Honestly, it’s a nice library, even I utilize its extensive resources sometimes, but the head of the family, Elias Bouchard, may just be the most dangerous person alive.

And second is probably his husband and secret weapon, Jonathan.

“I have a lead you might find interesting,” Jon says, picking a piece of non-existent dirt off his dress with two perfectly filed fingernails. “An in at the police station. I can probably get you access to the tapes that were found near her body.”

“And why would you bring that to me?”

Jon looks up at me and his eyes are black as raw coffee grounds and twice as electrifying. “Because you’re the only one looking.”

“But why do you care at all,” I press, because pressing is what I do. “Wouldn’t it be better for you and your husband if this case is never solved?”

Jon tosses his head aside, hair tumbling across his bare shoulder in the way I wish my fingers were. I’ve only just met him, but already I can see how Elias managed to get so much information out of people who knew he was extorting them. Jon just has an aura where you can’t say _no_.

“I knew her,” he says, after too long a pause, as if he’d just woken up from a daydream he wishes he was still in. “It’s important to me this case gets solved.”

“Not knocking my own skills here,” I clear my throat against the crack in my voice. “But if that’s the case why not work it yourself? I’ve heard the rumors, you’re quite adept at gathering intel, and you’ve got twice the connections I have.”

“I might have, once,” Jon says. He pushes himself up off my ratty couch and walks towards me. Every click of his high heels is like a nail being hammered into my coffin. By the time he reaches me, I would have done anything he asked. “But I’ve changed, Mr. Blackwood. I’m different now.”

“But wait,” I say, grasping at the last straws of my usually reliable self control. “How do I know you and your family didn’t kill her?”

“I suppose you don’t.” Jon slides a hand slowly down the front of my silk tie. “Sometimes, Mr. Blackwood, you simply have to take a leap of faith.” 

***

You’d think the prominent husband of a crime lord would have a few reservations about strolling into a police precinct, but that’s just the kind of place this is. Even the coppers who aren’t in the pocket of the big three families can’t get enough leverage to actually make a move against them. Jonathan certainly seems at home, striding right up to the reception desk and leaning over it, chatting genially with the woman behind it. He catches the eye of every person in that lobby, and I take a moment to remind myself the kind of company I’m keeping. Beautiful faces hide dangerous secrets in this city, and I’m not about to be taken for a ride that could end with my corpse in the sewers with three “heart attacks” through the chest.

We get buzzed through and I follow Jonathan through the narrow hallways to a small office with a bronze plaque. Detective Basira Hussein. Certainly looks official enough, but you never know where someone’s allegiances could lie. Any detective who is “acquainted” with the Magnus family is about as trustworthy as a lawyer without a paycheck. Jonathan knocks and then lets himself in without waiting on an answer. I hesitate for a moment on the threshold, but I already have my snorkel on at this point. Nothing to do but dive in.

“What did I tell you about coming here, Sims?”

“As I recall, nothing specific. And I’m not looking for trouble, Basira. I’m just making some introductions.”

Detective Hussein snorts. “Guys like you are always looking for trouble.”

Detective Basira Hussein has a glare that’s sharp as nails, and an attitude that’s sharper. From the neat folds of her headscarf to the sharp cuffs of her uniform, she is the picture of no-nonsense authority. I have a hunch she doesn’t exactly do a lot of talking with reporters, and she doesn’t seem like someone who would run with the Magnus family either. I’ve met her type. The world hits hard, so you hit back harder. I knew immediately that I didn’t want to find out just how hard she could hit.

“I heard you’re heading up the Robinson case,” Jonathan is saying, lounging across the hard plastic chair in front of her desk in a way that could not be comfortable. “Is that true?”

“Don’t ask questions.” Detective Hussein stands from her desk and crosses her arms.

“Fine.” Jonathan stretches a bit, like a cat. “I’ll make statements. You _are_ heading up the Gertrude Robinson murder investigation. You recovered the tapes found around her body. Your superiors are pressuring you to close the case as quickly and quietly as possible. They know it’s section business and will be more trouble than it’s worth. What I’m offering will help us both. Give over the investigation details and tapes to us, satisfy your boss with a neat little bow of lies and we’ll further the cause of justice in your stead. Considering we don’t have Nathaniel Lukas bankrolling our boss’ re-election to police chief, we’re far more likely to find the actual truth here.”

Detective Hussein looks over at me as if only just now noticing I exist. That’s a particular talent of mine, looking so ordinary I might as well be invisible. Comes in handy on my investigations. Doesn’t do worlds for my self esteem. 

“Who’s this ‘we’?” 

“Ah. Basira, this is Mr. Blackwood. He’s a journalist. And potentially the only person in this city besides you and myself actually asking the right questions.”

I feel myself get redder than a crab in a boil pot. That’s another particular talent of mine. Embarrassing myself in front of people. Definitely doesn’t come in handy ever.

“A reporter? No way.” Detective Hussein shakes her head once, sharply. “I let this get to the press and it’ll be my ass on the line. Either the police are involved and we get on the outs with one of the families, or the police aren’t involved and the whole precinct is embarrassed over the case some wet-nosed desk jockey could solve but we couldn’t. Lose lose.”

“He works for The Daily Thread.” Jonathan sits forward, looking at Detective Hussein seriously. The attitude in the room drops abruptly from chilly to sub-zero.

“Jonathan. This is a bad idea.”

“What does my newspaper have to do with any of this?” My reporter instinct is telling me this whole conversation is dipping into something darker than just one murder investigation, but my fingers keep scrabbling for purchase and I can’t find an in.

Detective Hussein looks at me like I just asked what two plus two is and then whips back to face Jonathan. “Seriously? _This_ is who you’re working with?”

“Okay. That’s enough.” I step forward into the room, asserting myself. I’m not exactly the smallest guy, and every now and then it’s worth using that to my advantage. “I’m done being talked over. A woman was killed, it was covered up, and whether you give us the tapes or not I’m going to find my way to the truth. All you have to do, Detective, is pick which side of this story you’re ending up on.”

I feel Jonathan’s eyes on me, appraising, but at that moment I couldn’t care less for him and his dazzling world of secrets and double talk. I’d been planning on solving this on my own from the jump, and I don’t need to suffer condescension to do just that.

“Is he one of yours?” Detective Hussein asks, but her voice is softer now, considering. 

“I’m not anyone’s.”

“He just told you, Basira,” Jonathan chimes in, pushing himself fluidly out of the chair, like a waterfall of fabric in reverse. “He’s on the side of truth. As we all are.”

Detective Hussein sighs deeply like Jonathan had dumped the whole world on her shoulders. I can’t help but relate. “Fine. I’ll get you some tapes.”

She straightens one of the cuffs of her uniform and sweeps past us out of the room. As the door clicks shut behind her, Jonathan lets out a breath and leans back against the front of her desk. 

“I think she likes you,” he says with a playful glint in his eye. I snort at that and let a bit of the tension I’d been unconsciously holding bleed out.

“I don’t think she’s ever liked anyone.”

“Just one, maybe. But let’s hope we don’t have to work with her partner. She has a bit of a vicious streak.” Jonathan reaches across Basira’s desk and grabs a fancy looking fountain pen which he twists between his fingers. “Tried to kill me once.”

“Is attempted murder the sort of thing that happens to you a lot?”

“More than I’d like,” Jonathan admits with another of his smooth, graceful shrugs.

It was the closest we had come so far to discussing what rested unspoken between us. Jonathan Bouchard is a criminal. And not just any criminal, one of the most well known faces of one of the most prolific crime families in the city. Why he is here, playing murder investigation with me, is unclear, but we both know one thing. Sooner or later he’ll show his true stripes, and we’ll have to go our separate ways. I just have to hope his inevitable betrayal won’t end with my body buried under their library.

“Jonathan—“ I start, but I am interrupted by Detective Hussein’s return. She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a small, unlabeled cassette tape.

“Here. You get one. I’m not about to start hauling bags of evidence out of lockup for you. When you’re done, send it back and I’ll send you a new one.” She holds the tape out to Jonathan stiffly. Her face says she is ready for us to leave, and I am inclined to agree. Jonathan reaches out for the tape in her hand and smiles. It isn’t even directed at me and I still feel my heart flip flop like a kid with a jump rope. Dangerous.

Detective Hussein holds fast to the tape for a moment, not letting Jonathan take it from her. She looks deep into his eyes and frowns. “Is Bouchard putting you up to this, Jon?”

“No. He doesn’t, well, he lets me use my judgment. You know that, Basira.”

“I don’t like him.”

“You don’t have to. But this is for me. I need to know.”

Detective Hussein doesn’t seem to like that answer much, but she lets go of the tape and Jon slips it down the front of his dress. He pushes off the desk and glides past her out the door, leaving me to stammer a quick thank you before hurrying after him.

It’s a few blocks away from the police precinct before Jonathan stops abruptly and turns toward me. He pulls at the deep v-neck of his dress and my treacherous eyes long to follow his hand down inside. He takes the tape and presses it into my hand. It is still warm from where it had been nestled against his chest. 

“You should keep this.”

“What? We aren’t going to listen together?”

“I have a pretty decent idea of what’s on it.” I’m not sure what that means, but Jonathan doesn’t leave me much time to ponder it. “You get what you can out of it, continue this investigation. Like I said, this isn’t who I am anymore, I have other obligations.”

“So this is it?” I ask and try not to sound plaintive, but it’s about as much good as trying not to blush when he flashes me that smile of his again.

“You’ll see me again, Mr. Blackwood. Trust me. I can’t rest until I find Gertrude’s killer.”

I open my mouth, not even sure which of the dozens of clamoring questions will fall out first, but Jonathan steps forward and interrupts me by pulling my tie free from where it is tucked into my vest. He wraps the fabric once around his hand, tugs my head low, and presses his mouth to mine. It is gentle, so gentle, his plush lips barely moving. But even just that tiny taste of him is maddening.

“I’ll find you again soon, Mr. Blackwood,” Jonathan says, and in a whirl of red silk he turns and leaves me gaping like a fish on the sidewalk. I watch him go, left with nothing but a still-warm cassette tape in my hand and a head filled with more questions than I’d begun the day with. Two things are for certain, though. This case is going to be an interesting one, and I definitely cannot trust Jonathan Bouchard.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can find me at [apatheticbutterflies](https://apatheticbutterflies.tumblr.com/) on tumblr, I post meta and writing! Come hang out with me, I'm fun. We can talk about pretty jon in a dress :D


	2. Martin Blackwood and the Waxworks Woman

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw for burns

I wish I could say I was surprised when I caught the silhouette of a man leaned back against the lit window of the Molotov, the smoke curling up from the glowing end of his cigarette almost lost in the dusty rain. But he said he’d see me again, and when someone like Jonathan Bouchard makes a promise, he tends to keep it. He looks over at me when I walk up, those deep brown irises so dark they make the whites of his eyes nearly glow in the flickering streetlight. The upturned collar of my shirt is not enough to keep out the greedy fingers of the chilly evening air, but Jonathan’s eyes on me send a bolt of heat straight through me like a localized lightning strike.

The tape he’d helped me commandeer from Detective Hussein didn’t contain much in the way of clues about Gertrude’s murder, but it did raise a few more interesting questions. Not that questions are what I need right now considering I’m already choking on a swell of unanswered questions the way this city is choking on smog. I listened first thing when I got back to my office, and the voice of the woman Gertrude was interviewing was unfamiliar, but the name she dropped was unmistakable. 

Jude Perry. A famous crook. I couldn’t tell you if she’s better known for the alcohol at her bar being strong enough to burn off the inside of your throat, or for the string of men she’s said to have burned alive with actual fire. From what I’ve heard, it’s an equal number of casualties from both.

Her gang operates their rum running business out of the back of The Molotov with all the subtlety of a cat wearing tap shoes. But you don’t need to be subtle as long as you have enough grease for the palms of the higher ups in the police force, and Perry’s crew has plenty of resources. It’s no secret they’re sponsored by the young miss Montague, heir to the Montague candle fortune. They’ll light up your house and snuff out your enemies.

A ring of for-hire assassins funding a group of violently delinquent smugglers. Everyone’s wearing a mask in this city. And there’s enough layers to make a baker break down and weep.

“So you figured it out.” Jonathan slices like a hot knife through my thought process. He’s pushed himself off the wall and is standing next to me in that way he does. That _far too close for comfort_ way he does.

“Was this a test?” 

“Hardly.” Jonathan rolls his thin shoulders back. He must be cold, half-bare in the dreary evening chill. “But a reporter who doesn’t even know to find Perry here isn’t worth my time to work with.”

“That’s the definition of a test,” I grumble, but when he plucks the cigarette from his lips and holds it out to me, I take it, because I have even less self respect than I have self preservation. I take a long drag and hold my breath.

Cloves.

He leads the way into the Molotov, and from the moment he steps inside it’s clear he’s a regular. The grimy floors and low-hanging cloud of smoke don’t match his silk dress and throat hung with jewels, but he swims through the space with a familiar confidence. The few patrons hunched over their shot glasses at the bar or huddled in the poorly-lit corners turn to face him as he makes his way straight through to the bartender. She’s a squat lady, couldn’t be more than five foot, with buzzed black hair and cruel black eyes. Her lower lip looks like it was chewed up by a dog, or a lover with a vendetta. Her shoulders overflow out of her grease-stained wifebeater. 

My gut tells me this is who we’re looking for. Jude Perry. She certainly looks like she could put a few nails in an old woman’s coffin.

“Jonathan,” Jude says, her voice dripping with history. “Diego’s not here. He’s at home with a bad case of two black eyes and hopefully four or five concussions.”

“You really shouldn’t hold it against him.” Jonathan tips forward and leans lazily over the back of a barstool. I approach quietly, but Jude doesn’t even seem to notice me. “Men like him can’t help that their brains are in their dicks.”

“Well you’re not getting anything out of me, sweet lips. I don’t swing your way.”

“They all say that at first.” Jonathan runs a finger thoughtfully along his plush bottom lip. “But you sorted everything with Elias, anyway. No one will be buying details of your shipments as long as we stay on good terms.”

“Highway fucking robbery,” Jude grumbles, crossing her arms.

“Better than literally robbing people on literal highways. Which I’ve heard you’re not above.”

“Yes, yes, you’re both very scary,” I cut in, stabbing Jonathan’s cigarette viciously into the ashtray on the bar and rubbing it out. Jude turns to stare at me like I just appeared out of thin air. “But we didn’t come here for pleasantries and thinly veiled threats.”

“Who the fuck is this clown?” Jude juts a thumb in my direction. 

“My associate, Mr. Blackwood. We’re hunting down some information.”

“That’s your business, not ours.”

“When was the last time you spoke with Gertrude Robinson?” I pull a notepad out of my pocket and flip it open to a fresh page. Jude stares down at it with a sneer that looks even more violent on her scarred face.

“That old bat? That’s who this is about?”

“Answer his question,” Jonathan says, sternly.

“I dunno, a few months before she vanished maybe?” Jude flips a dishrag over her shoulder and cracks the knuckles in her fingers absentmindedly. Each one sounds off like a gunshot. “She fucked up a massive operation. We’d been planning it for months and at the last second, Agnes called it off. Said it’d been compromised. She didn’t say Gertrude was behind it, but we all knew. Those two had been playing some kind of sick cat and mouse game across the city for years. Wouldn’t let any of us get involved.”

I flick my eyes sideways towards Jonathan. That was a motive, and Perry was drowning in means. It would have been a cinch for her to take out Gertrude in retaliation.

“She came in here interviewing everyone, just like you’re doing now. Only one she didn’t talk to was Agnes, and I don’t know what she got out of it. She was asking after stuff we didn’t know. About the preparations we’d made for our operation. She’d already fucked us months ago, why did she suddenly care now? But I know better than to try and understand your types. You’d question your own head if it fell off.”

“Very imaginative. Thank you, Jude.”

Jude narrows her eyes. “What do you want from me, Jonathan. Your husband’s already got us by the short and curlies.”

“I think I’d like to talk to Agnes.” Jonathan smiles, pretty as a viper. “I know she’s here.”

Jude looks positively murderous. I think I’ve seen more loving expressions on crocodiles. “I already said she didn’t talk to your old dead bitch.”

“That’s why it’s important,” I burst in. Jonathan looks over at me in surprise and I struggle to keep focused on Jude. “Always investigate the break in the pattern.”

“What the man said,” Jonathan says, with a casual flick of his head. “Oh, and can we get a drink while we wait?”

“Fuck off, Bouchard.”

The two shot glasses that slam down on the bar in front of us are a stirring testament to just how much power the name _Bouchard_ carries in this city. Perry’s far from a pushover, I can read that just as easily in the patchwork of scars on her face as I can in the obituary section of our newspaper. But Jonathan twirls his skirts and bats his eyelashes and she melts before his every request, and I’m as sure as sherbert it’s not cause she’s sweet on him. He’s a powerful ally to have on this investigation. If only I could be a little more confident the term _ally_ actually applies.

I’m not sure what’s in the glass, and I try not to drink on the job, but knee deep in the Lightless Flame gang and about to come face to face with one of the most infamous crime bosses this rotten city has to offer? I need all the courage I can get, and I’m not about to turn my nose up at some of the liquid variety.

I barely get my hand around the shot before I have to jerk it away again, the glass like molten lava against my skin. It feels as though Perry popped it in the oven a few years ago and promptly forgot about it until Jonathan came sauntering in and shredded the remains of her manhood with the perfectly manicured tips of his nails. Which is probably more or less what happened. Upon closer inspection, the liquid in the glass is bubbling slightly, in a way more reminiscent of acid than seltzer. Probably a blessing that I couldn’t get it up to my mouth, as whatever superheated alcohol she’d poured in there would have entirely wiped out my ability to audibly question Ms. Montague. Not to mention the fact that the quantity of heat Perry must have applied almost certainly took any of the _courage_ out of the drink already.

“Let’s go over some ground rules,” Jonathan says, looking unimpressed at the way I’m flapping my hand to try and cool the burning flesh.

“You knew not to touch the glass.”

“Lightless Flame gang, Mr. Blackwood. They live up to their title.” Jonathan sniffs primly and shakes out his hair a bit like a show dog trotting up to the judge’s table. 

“You didn’t think I could use a little warning?” I try not to let my voice crack over the indignation like some prepubescent child. I may be getting jerked around like a kite with a few too many strings, but I can at least attempt to maintain some dignity. I’m not here for Jonathan Bouchard to like me, I’m here to get to the bottom of this case. And if he happens to like me along the way, well. I glance at him from the corner of my eyes and he’s staring right back at me. Just the barest mote of his attention has my stomach rolling up like a retractable screen.

“I’d hoped you wouldn’t need me to explicitly tell you not to stick your fingers where they don’t belong. Though I suppose that’s what your type like to do.” Jonathan sounds deeply unimpressed and I wonder again why he’s bothering to work with me at all.

“My _type_?” I brace my still-stinging hand against the bar top and immediately regret it. “You mean reporters?”

Jonathan stares at me for a long, quiet moment as if there’s something he’s trying to find in my eyes. I don’t know what it is, or if he finds it, but I’m inclined to let him keep trying. I could let Jonathan stare at me all night. Finally, he breaks away and reaches out for one of my hands, slipping his long, thin fingers in and around mine. They’re a cool slice of heaven against my burnt skin, even as I feel my face growing hotter to compensate.

“How about this,” Jonathan hums in a low, inviting tone. “While we’re in here, just keep these hands entirely to yourself. For safety.”

It must be the reporter in me that makes me answer, “And what if I don’t?”

“What?” Jonathan lifts one of my hands to his mouth and presses my finger into his bottom lip, dragging it down until I can see the tops of his gums under that devilish white smile. “You want me to say I’ll kiss it better?”

I know it’s a show, a deflection, but damn if it isn’t a good one.

“Jonathan.” A harsh voice cuts between us. 

I pull my hand back like it’s been burned (again. Wasn’t I just warned to look but not touch?) as Jonathan turns to face the door to the backroom where Jude is standing, arms crossed and mouth twisted. 

“Agnes says she’ll see you.”

The scowl on Jude’s face says she was hoping Agnes would refuse us, or maybe that she’d authorize Jude to pull the secret lever I have no doubt she has to open up the floor of the bar and dump Jonathan and I into a vat of boiling oil like some sort of villain from a cartoon. The confidence Jonathan has as he slips past her into the backroom says there was nothing Agnes could have said to deny his visit anyway. Even though his casual grace is uninterrupted, I can’t help but notice the way Jonathan maneuvers his body to keep it safely clear of accidentally brushing up against any part of Jude.

In what might be the first smart decision I’ve made since Jonathan Bouchard waltzed his way into my life, I did the same. Just from that proximity I could already feel the heat rolling off of her like a campfire, and she smelled like one too. Fresh charcoal, still glowing. I filed the odd information away in the back of my brain, to turn over later when I had the time.

I can count on one hand the number of people in this city who’ve come face to face with Agnes Montague and are still around to brag about the privilege. One of them is a few steps in front of me, silk skirts still settling as he comes to a stop in front of the ornate metal chair where Agnes slouches, dangerous in her boredom like a ginger lioness. 

Agnes doesn’t look much more than twenty something, though I know for a fact she’s been actively heading up the Lightless Flame for at least forty or so years. A testament to deep pockets and modern surgeries, perhaps. It’s unsettling all the same.

Her youthful face is made more youthful by the scattershot freckles that cut through her face like lit windows in a city skyline. Her long red hair hangs loose about her shoulders, spilling out over the armrest she’s leaning back against, thick curls inviting fingers to slide through them, but I don’t need Jonathan’s warnings to know this is one pretty picture I should never dare to touch. In the dimly lit backroom, her eyes glow like the end of Jonathan’s cigarette in the rain. Must be a trick of the light. Or my nerves getting the best of me.

“You’re here to ask about Gertrude,” she says, in a voice like a brushfire. Catching the old dead detritus and setting it alight.

“Yes,” Jonathan answers.

“Don’t.”

I can feel Jonathan’s annoyance rising off him like smoke. “Why let us back here if you’re just going to be obstinate?”

“You don’t get to talk to me like that, Archivist.” Agnes lifts her legs from where they’re slung over the side of her chair and plants them firmly on the ground. “I’m a god.”

I snort. Not my brightest move this deep in enemy territory, I know, but I can’t help it. A god? Have the big power players of this city really gone so far up their own asses that they can say things like that unironically? Agnes’ eyes flick to me like the click of a lighter, somehow seeming to grow even brighter as they do. She pushes herself to her feet, and that’s when I begin to think I’ve really made a mistake.

“I don’t like spiders,” Agnes says, taking a step away from her, christ, it’s supposed to be a _throne_ isn’t it?

“He’s not one of hers,” Jonathan says. Another one of those sentences where I understand all the words but the meaning slips away like butter in a hot pan. Those have been happening frustratingly often with Jonathan around. 

“I’m a reporter for the _Daily Thread_ , Ms. Montague,” I say, trying to wrest back control of the conversation somehow. Hopefully Agnes doesn’t mind reporters being in her smuggler’s den. But all of this being a terrible idea has never stopped me before. “What do you know about Gertrude Robinson?”

“I know she’s dead.” Agnes takes a few steps forward until she’s nearly level with Jonathan and then holds out a hand, palm up. He slips his fingers down the low-cut neckline of his dress and fishes out a packet of smokes before shaking one into her waiting hand. She twirls the cigarette up between her fingers and inclines her head a bit to Jonathan.

“We’re aware of that,” I say, trying not to lose my patience. “How about something a little earlier?”

“I could tell you when she died.”

“You know the date of death?” I’d usually take it as a sure sign of guilt, but it’s offered up too easily, and Agnes doesn’t seem like the type to mock. That and there’s something in her eyes, something sad and distant, that makes me sure she didn’t do it. Sometimes all a reporter has is his instincts, and mine are saying I’ve only scratched the surface of this twisted web.

“We were close.” Agnes brings the cigarette up to her mouth and balances it loosely between her lips. It’s unlit. She brings up a hand and when she moves it away again, the end of the smoke is glowing a pale orange. I didn’t even see the lighter.

“Neat trick.”

“March 15th. One day she was here and the next,” Agnes pulls the cigarette from her mouth and breathes out a thin line of smoke that curls up towards the ceiling. “Poof. Gone.”

“March 15th,” I echo as I scribble it down in my notepad, quick as I can. Best not to lose whatever ounce of giving mood I’d managed to eke out of Ms. Montague. “And do you know what she was doing that day?”

“What Gertie always did,” Agnes answers in a dull, exhausted tone that made me think this was an argument the two of them had lost themselves in more times than I’d want recounted. “Stick her nose in where it doesn’t belong.”

Jonathan makes a soft, offended sound. But he’s not the reporter in the room. I look back up from my notebook, pen at the ready. “And how often was that nose sniffing out something the Lightless Flame didn’t want disrupted?”

Agnes laughs like the snap of a campfire. I can’t help but find myself watching for sparks coming off the auburn dance of her hair as she turns away from me, nonsensical as that is. If Jonathan had asked me right then, with those pretty eyes of his I can’t say no to, if I thought Agnes Montague was like Aphrodite, born out of flame instead of sea foam, I think I probably would have said yes. 

And then I would’ve immediately had my reporter’s license revoked for letting myself get caught up in fairy tales.

“He’s asking about our ritual,” Agnes says, gliding back over towards Jonathan with a casual swing of her hips as she walked.

“He’s asking about your business,” Jonathan corrects.

“I’m still standing here,” I say, but I have a feeling it won’t much change things. It’s like playing poker with giants. They may take some time to bend over, enjoy the game, but eventually they’re gonna smash the table, and you just gotta make sure you don’t get smashed right along with it.

“You _know_ Gertrude cared about rum running about as much as she cared about Saturday crosswords,” Agnes huffs, what I assume is cigarette smoke billowing up over her head. I scribble down _Not much for the crossword section_ under my laughably sparse notes about Ms. Robinson.

“I don’t know _what_ I know.” Jon brushes back a lock of his hair, tipping his chin up slightly. If he wasn’t quite so pretty, he’d probably get his insides on the outside doing that in front of a notorious gang leader, but instead Agnes just sighs.

“Our ritual got bound up in strings, Archivist. Gertrude just happened to be wrapped up at the same time.”

There’s that word again. Ritual. I hadn’t thought the Lightless Flame, for all people called it a cult, was that religious. But Agnes had called herself a god, hadn’t she? The underbelly of this city is like a swamp—every step you take just sinks you further down, and you’ll never see the bottom until you’re already drowning in it.

“I didn’t want her dead, Archivist.” Agnes’ voice is soft like dripping wax, runny for just a moment before solidifying. She strikes a mournful silhouette with her back turned, long red hair waterfalling down in perfect curls, shoulders hunched just enough for me to see the human hiding underneath all that bluster and charm. I’ve always had a soft spot for gingers, they make me think of my mother in a way that I keep in a small box high on a shelf in my mind. 

It’s weakness, maybe, the kind of thing that’s gonna get me killed one day.

“I believe you.” 

I’ve always begrudged my relative anonymity. Growing up, I was the last kid picked for every sports game, and when I go out to meet people I might as well be a lonely lump grown up organically out of my barstool. Spending time with Jonathan Bouchard has been like a tube of red lipstick sharpened into a knife and driven straight into the core of all my insecurities. But I missed the simple sheath of unimportance in that moment when Jonathan and Agnes both turned to me with gazes so intense they could have knocked me backwards ass over teakettle twice over and left my shoes behind where I’d been standing.

Agnes blinks, and I swear that glow in her eyes _flickers_ like candle light, even though I would have bet my last paycheck on not having seen any windows when I walked into the backroom. She doesn’t exhale the smoke from her cigarette, it merely crawls upward, lazily, from the gaps between her teeth as she stares at me in silent, breathless intensity.

“Just like that?”

I shrug and it feels hopelessly banal next to the flowing way she strides back over to me. “You seem honest.”

“There’s not much of that in this business.”

“Well, I’m not in your business.” My eyes flick past her to Jonathan, but his expression doesn’t change, he just watches me dig myself into what is most likely my grave—or rather urn if the rumors are accurate—with a silent, considering gaze that stirs up enough butterflies in my throat that I could choke on them.

“An earnest reporter working for the Daily Thread.” Agnes shakes her head slowly and pulls the cigarette off of her dangling bottom lip. “Gertie would never have believed it.”

“I don’t put much stock in the opinions of a crime lord on honest press,” I say, and breathe in before throwing my next sentence on the table like a pair of two’s I’m trying to pass for a straight. “But if you really cared about Gertrude, don’t you want her murderer to come to justice?”

It’s a desperate play—counting on someone like Agnes Montague to help out of the goodness of her heart. Jonathan would probably never have done it, but Jonathan wouldn’t have _had_ to do it. He knows this world, moves through it like a shark while I have to doggy paddle helplessly along in his wake. For the thousandth time, I wonder why he’s bothering to drag me along on this little investigation, and suddenly, with his eyes like dark spotlights on me, I wonder if it’s just a game to him. Maybe he’s waiting for me to get burned. 

Slowly, Agnes holds the half-smoked cigarette out towards me, filter first. I hesitate. Why am I nervous? It’s just a cigarette. Just a cigarette. 

“Something else happened that same night. March 15th.” Agnes doesn’t meet my eyes. “An attempted religious rite that never manifested. The sort of thing Gertie paid special attention to.”

The People’s Church. A bloated tick attached to the side of a city desperate for salvation and determined to never deserve it. I have a running theory that the entire thing is a pyramid scheme, though I’ve never figured out where the money comes into it. All I see is struggling people going in with bright eyes and coming out dark. The Church wouldn’t have any qualms about snuffing out a troublemaker who got in their way.

I reach out and grab the cigarette. 

I think I hear Jonathan gasp in the moment before the cigarette crumbles into white-hot ash in my hand, but it’s hard to tell over the sudden rushing of blood in my ears as I scream in pain. It’s something like how I imagine shoving my hand into the softly glowing coals of a dying campfire would be. Blinding, searing pain that shuts off the part of my brain that knows how to keep up an internal running monologue.

I surface from the haze with my hand submerged in a glass of ice water, back out at the front of the Molotov. Agnes is gone, and Jude is nowhere to be seen, but Jonathan is leaning against the bar in front of me, a bored expression in his dark eyes, one slender finger stirring around a glass of clear, honey brown liquid. I move my hand experimentally around the ice, and nothing seems to be damaged. I curl my fingers one by one, pushing past the bolting jabs of pain that lance up my arm each time. 

“I’m surprised—” I wince, “That this ice isn’t melted.” 

“I poured it,” Jonathan answers as if that clarifies anything. There’s a picture coming together here, piece by odd-shaped piece, and maybe I’d be able to see it better if my head wasn’t throbbing in pace with my heart as I watch Jonathan lift his dripping finger from his glass to his mouth and sensuously suck it clean.

“What happened to don’t touch?”

“I told _you_ not to touch.” Jonathan glares at me, and even angry looks lovely on him. Like a smouldering starlet from the pictures. He reaches out and grabs my wrist and tugs my hand up out of the water. “And you didn’t listen to me.”

“Maybe it’d be easier to listen if you actually told me what’s going on with this place,” I snap. That cigarette had been whole and normal the moment before I touched it and then it just disintegrated. There’s not much I can rely on in this city, but I’ve always trusted in my own eyes.

“We don’t have time for that.” Jonathan isn’t even looking at me, he’s staring out the windows at the dark night sky that’s just barely beginning to lighten into gray like a tv set starting to fuzz. “It’ll be morning soon, and the Church will be closed.”

“We’re doing that _now?_ ” I try not to sound like a whining child, but the crack in my voice stabs me in the back. Jonathan looks deeply unimpressed, which, I suppose is the only real emotion someone like him could feel towards someone like me.

“The longer we delay, the less likely we are to find the truth.”

“But—” I turn and stare down at my hand. The skin of my palm is angry red and blistered along the joints.

“What, do you _actually_ need me to kiss it better?” Jonathan raises one, perfectly sculpted eyebrow in the picture of disdain. I feel heat rise from the collar of my shirt and creep into my cheeks.

“That isn’t just going to work everytime,” I say, trying to sound like a man in control of the situation even while I know I am not and have never been. Jonathan stares at me with eyes that see right through me. He reaches into the glass of water and fishes out a single ice cube, holding it delicately between his thumb and forefinger. I watch as he slowly, deliberately, opens that dangerous mouth of his and smooths the ice across his plush, red lips. 

The kiss he presses to my burned palm is a delicious, freezing numb. 

“Let’s go,” he says, and when Jonathan walks, there is nothing to do but follow. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! I'm [@apatheticbutterflies](https://apatheticbutterflies.tumblr.com/) on tumblr if you wanna come chat. Thanks to J_Quadrifrons for the beta!
> 
> Next up! Jon and Martin face the dark. See you then!


	3. Martin Blackwood and the Blinded Bishop

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Extra content warnings for this chapter in the end notes.

This city is an entirely different place when you’re walking through it with Jonathan Bouchard. I don’t usually go a day without some bigwig, high-collared, business type slamming my shoulder halfway out of socket as they barge blindly forward towards whatever important meeting can’t wait another second, but walking down the streets with Jonathan at my side, people jump to get out of our way. Cars screech to a skidding halt when he even considers crossing the road. Even the rain doesn’t dare fall where he’s standing.

When he’d marched out of The Molotov—and I’d swept along in his wake like a dead leaf in a pool filter—I’d half expected him to snap his fingers and make a long, black car with tinted windows pop into existence on the curb simply because he needed it. Instead, he seems content to walk. He moves fast on those toothpick heels of his, long, flimsy skirt billowing with the speed of it. I’d like to say I ignored the peekaboo flashes of his smooth, lean thighs because of journalistic integrity and professionalism, but truthfully? I needed all my focus just to not get left behind.

This is what’s been happening all along—Jonathan five steps ahead, talking in some language I don’t understand but everyone around me does, chasing answers I’m beginning to suspect I wouldn’t recognize even if they were staring me in the face. If he thinks he can just move fast enough to keep my questions from catching up with him, then he is severely underestimating how persistent I can be. I may be less important than him, and less talented, less in tune with the underbelly of this city, but I’m not an idiot. Something is going on here, something sinister, and it’s far deeper than guns and gangs and turf wars, and if Jonathan plans to drag me under the surface, then I’m going to get some answers before the water closes over my head.

I’m done with being left in the dark.

“We’re here.” Jonathan stops and I stop with him, turning to stare up at the massive stone church climbing dizzyingly into the sky above us. “And in perfect time. Evening mass is just about over.”

“Hold on.” I almost reach out and grab Jonathan’s arm, but I lose my nerve at the last second, pulling my hand back into my chest like a child cradling a wound. The look Jonathan gives me as he turns back is exasperated at best, scathing at worst, and I hurry to get the questions out before they die a pathetic, shameful death on my tongue.

“I think it’s time,” I babble out in a mess of sounds all rushed out together like a typewriter with a paper jam.

Jonathan raises one perfectly sculpted eyebrow and I swear I can hear his metaphorical toe tapping impatiently in the low tone of his voice. “Time for what?”

“Time for you to tell me what’s actually going on here. And don’t say a murder investigation.”

“I’m sorry, I was under the impression that it _was_ a murder investigation.”

“I mean the magic,” I snap. “Jude, Ms. Montague, the things I saw them do were not human. O-or they were _beyond_ human. Agnes lit a cigarette with her finger.”

Jonathan rolls his eyes. “A parlor trick.”

“What about the heat I felt coming off of Jude’s body?”

“The bar has a kitchen.”

“I took that smoke, and it burned my hand like I’d left it on a hot stove.” I thrust my hand out in front of me, forcing Jonathan to admit the reality of the red and blistered flesh. It still hurts, I can feel it pulsing up my arm like a stinging heartbeat.

Jonathan turns away. Avoiding eye contact is a sign of guilt, I don’t need a journalism degree to tell you that. Which is good, considering I don’t technically have a journalism degree.

“You blacked out from the pain.” Jonathan’s voice goes soft, like a play at vulnerability, but I’ve been hanging around him too long now not to realize it’s all a front. “How confidently can you recall exactly what happened?”

“I’m not trying to establish a timeline in front of a courtroom, Jonathan, I’m asking you to tell me what happened. I thought we were in on this together.” I brace my hands on my hips and inflate my chest with a bravado that is sixty percent hot air and forty percent the time delay before the proper sense of panic and fear can make its way up to my brain. “Aren’t we supposed to be partners?”

Jonathan laughs, not the smooth giggle of a honeypot drawing you deeper, but a crude laugh, mocking and severe. “I don’t do partners.”

“Well you’re doing one now!” Jonathan’s eyes flick down over my body and my cheeks light up like a fireworks display. “Not like that, princess, get your mind out of the gutter.”

“Princess?”

“Listen, Jonathan,” I say in my most endearing, charming voice. The one that says _have you looked at me? I’m obviously not a threat._ “If you don’t want to work with me then why even bother showing up at my door? I didn’t ask for this. _You_ did. You’re the one with the know how and the resources and the talent. I’m an overweight hack job in a thirty dollar suit whose boss won’t even give him a headline story. You don’t need me.”

Jonathan turns away from me a bit which I suspect is just so he can look properly coy when he tilts his head back and glances up at me from beneath those long, dark eyelashes of his. For a moment, I entertain the foolish notion that he’s about to disagree with me. Say something like, _actually Martin you have no idea how special you are, you’re the only one who can solve this case, and also you’re really pulling off that discount polyester I wouldn’t have assumed you got it for any less than two hundred._

But instead what he says is, “I don’t trust myself to do it alone. Anybody would do, really. You’re just conveniently unaffiliated.”

“Well then. At least we have one thing in common.” I turn away from Jonathan Bouchard and march towards the steps leading up to the church. “I don’t trust you either.”

From the soft sound Jonathan makes behind me, I’d suspect I just hurt his feelings, but I’ve spent long enough around him by this point to realize he doesn’t have any. Just sparkle and showmanship. It’s all a game to him, even a murder investigation. My whole life is a single piece on a gold and ivory chess board. If I walked away right now, I’d give it two days before he entirely forgot my name.

But I don’t walk away, because I’m not that kind of guy. And because Gertrude Robinson spent her whole life fighting against rich, entitled, corrupted gangs like this and she deserves someone who actually cares about finding her killer. So instead, I walk towards. Straight up to the huge, dark, carved oak doors of the People’s Church of the Divine Host.

“I’ll take the lead on this one,” I announce, and before Jonathan can disagree with me, I grab the huge, hanging door handle and pull.

My mother used to say that there is no greater conman than someone selling heaven. In a city like this one, where money speaks louder than words and everyday the papers are running lines about some kind of apocalypse or another, salvation is the closest shot most people have to happiness. I don’t know if I would personally call The People’s Church a religion, I’d call it something at the crossroads between cult and scam, but it certainly holds a powerful sway with the people in this city, as well as its government. “Donations” from the church have found their way into the pockets of all the major players—the Fairchilds, the Lukases, even the Magnus family lines their coffers with coins from collection plates. Yet another good reason not to let Jonathan do the talking. I can’t trust him not to have ulterior motivations.

I hear the click of his heels behind me as I step into the church’s foyer. If it wasn’t for the light filtering in from the open door behind me, the place would be entirely pitch black. Deeper in, I can only just barely make out the shiny, lacquered edges of pews and the formless mass of bodies shifting in the darkness. It’s impossible to count how many people are standing there in silent worship, their backs to me, facing forwards towards a priest I cannot see. I have nothing against spiritualism, and a man’s faith can pull him through a lot, but being in this place gave me none of the warm, hopeful feelings of community I’d always associated with religion. All I felt was a stirring dread like whiskey on an empty stomach, and the certainty that something terrible was coming closer.

“Welcome, parishioners.” A woman’s voice, but I can barely see through the thick blanket of darkness to make out the features of her face. Her hand lands lightly on my upper arm and I nearly leap out of my skin at the clammy touch. This place is like the manifestation of a jump scare. “Did you come to join in our worship?”

“My name’s Martin Blackwood, I’m a reporter, and this is Jonathan Bouchard. The Archivist.” Straightforward and to the point. I don’t need to play Jonathan’s coy games in order to get my job done. 

“Names and _titles_ —” she says the word with a jab and there’s just enough light filtering through from the door behind me to catch and shine on the white of her smile— “mean nothing to the Blinded God. It sees no one, and so all are equal beneath it.”

It takes a considerable amount of my self control not to make a comment about how the higher ups in the church seem awfully concerned with power and press for religious types with such a monastic philosophy. It takes an even more considerable amount to not roll my eyes. It’s so dark. Who would notice?

“But,” the woman concludes, “you may call me Manuela.”

“Ms. Manuela,” I say, pulling my notebook out of my pocket before I realize it’s probably useless here. “I’ve come to ask a few questions regarding the church’s actions on the fifteenth of March. Can I take down your statement?”

“My statement? I suppose I can see now why the Bouchard family is traveling around with a stray cat nipping their heels.” And there it is. Again. Manuela’s gaze wandering off of me and settling on Jonathan, just like Detective Hussein’s and Jude Perry’s and Agnes Montague’s. He hadn’t even said anything this time and already he was the main character of the story and I was stuck backstage working the curtains. Next thing I know, he'll be giving me his coffee order while he sits in my office chair and uses torn out pages of my case notebook to smudge his perfect eyeshadow.

 _I don’t trust myself to do it alone_. What hogwash. Jonathan Bouchard puts on faces like a monarch puts on airs. More likely he didn’t want to waste his masterful performance on an audience that’s already seen through him. I’m done with playing second fiddle in my own damn orchestra.

“Actually, this is my investigation,” I snap. Manuela looks back at me and I swear I see the hint of movement as she blinks in surprise. Good. I’m ready to be taken seriously. “And if you have answers to my questions, you’ll direct them at me.”

“The cat has claws,” Manuela murmurs, but she sounds more intrigued than she did before, like I’m a specimen stretched out beneath a microscope. Not exactly what I was going for, but better than being ignored.

“ _He_ does. Now about March fifteenth—”

“I heard you the first time, Mr. Blackwood. But you can hardly expect me to remember what was going on in our church on every random day.” My gut says that she’s lying, but I decide not to press on it yet. “Father Raynor might know, but as you can see he’s rather busy. You’re welcome to wait, take in the sermon.”

My spine stiffens at the thought of wading into that dark mass of worshippers spread out in front of me. I have the inescapable feeling that when I reached them they would part around me like an oil slick, a viscous wave of human flesh, and I want to be in the middle of that about as much as I want to invite my mother to tour the broom closet cubicle I work out of down at the Thread. Hopefully it’s too dim for Jonathan to see the way I crumple like a house of cards. I don’t need another excuse to lose any potential respect he still has for me.

“Or,” Manuela continues, “we do have a records room downstairs. I’m sure you could find some schedules or accounts that might be useful to you there.”

“Yes,” I recover quickly, grabbing my dignity and rescuing it from the quicksand it had been slowly sinking into. A better middle ground between braving the pitch black sanctuary and fleeing for the hills like the incorrigible coward I am. Besides, a records room might actually be useful. Ink can’t bend the way a person can. “Yes, that sounds useful. Thank you, Ms. Manuela.”

I turn back to face Jonathan who has been surprisingly compliant with being made to wait as I take the lead in the investigation. I don’t think I’ve seen him this quiet for this long since the day he burst into my office and busted my neat understanding of the city around me into a thousand scattered jigsaw pieces that I swear used to form a picture. He’s staring at me. I try to ignore the weight of it, like a sudden deluge of rain crushing down on my shoulders. The burned and blistered skin on my hand stings.

“How about you stay up here and make sure Raynor doesn’t slip out after the service is done?” I would have rather this be a command rather than a request, but there’s only so far feigned confidence can carry me. “I’ll pop downstairs to the records room and come back and then we can question him together.”

Jonathan opens his mouth and even through the dark I can read the disagreement in his eyes and the set of his shoulders. Probably an immediate, innate need to snatch back control. Maybe tell me in some coy, mysterious way that I really shouldn’t be left alone to inspect the books considering I’m just a backwater, third-rate, junior reporter who can’t possibly understand what I’m looking for. As if he expects me to when he won’t even tell me what we’re really doing here. Or what these people we’re meeting are really capable of.

Jonathan runs his tongue along the bottoms of his teeth, I can see the faint glint of spit against the shine of his lipstick. He glances from one of my eyes to another, dangling on the edge of saying something, and then he looks away. 

A sign of guilt.

“You’re in charge,” he says, and I’d bet my only good cufflinks that it’s not what he wanted to say before. But there’s something to be said about gift horses and their mouths, and it’s really too dark in here to be looking in anything.

“Well then, Archivist.” I can _hear_ the smirk in Manuela’s voice and I take a moment to wonder what happened to the blinded god not caring for titles. “You just stay here and I’ll show our friend Mr. Blackwood down to the basement.”

Jonathan must have nodded or gave some sign of assent because Manuela’s hand lands on my upper arm and starts tugging me towards the empty void deeper in the church. Her skin is cold, clammy, like an eel toweled dry. Almost right, but with a wriggling, slimy, sense of being out of place beneath. We hadn’t even gone three steps before the last dregs of gray light from the door frame were devoured and assimilated into the shadows all around us. I mourned it like I mourn those last dregs of my whiskey, painted onto the bottom of my glass and rinsed pointlessly down the drain. In both cases, I knew deep in my gut that the evening was going to end in miserable blackness.

“Hold on.” I almost jump when I hear Jonathan’s voice. I could’ve sworn we’d walked farther from him, or maybe that he had never been here, just a figment of my overactive imagination trying to convince me someone else cared about this case besides me. Or a figment of my perfectly accurate self perception reminding me that, even when I’m entirely alone, I’m still somehow the least competent reporter in the room.

A light clicks on and I lift my hand up to stop myself being blinded. It feels like my rods mugged my cones in an alley and left them crumpled up against my corneas begging for spare sunlight. Takes me a moment to realize the light isn’t the flashbulb brightness I’d taken it for in my Dracula-like recoil, but a single, tiny, wavering point of flame. A lighter. Jon’s lighter. It gives off just enough light for me to see the thin crooked arc of his nose outlined in stunning relief, and the bottom corner of one, dark, hungry eye.

And then, with another click, it’s gone.

“You’ll need something to read those records by,” Jonathan says. I feel his hand find mine somehow in the darkness, long soft fingers tracing into my palm as he presses the thin lighter into my skin until I get my wits around me enough to take it from him. The difference between his and Manuela’s hands is like night and day. And I mean that literally. Like shadows and sunrises. Like space and sky.

I waffle over whether I should say thank you long enough that Manuela tugs me into movement again and then it’s too late. It’s for the best anyway. I don’t need to buckle like worn out suspenders every time someone does the bare minimum for me. It hasn’t worked so well up until now, no reason to expect that would change.

“Watch your step,” Manuela says not so helpfully as I tumble through a square of blackness slightly blacker than all the black around it and take a rough landing on my ankle a few stairs farther down than I should’ve. I give it an experimental roll and it only twinges a little. I count the seconds by the way it throbs in time with the pulsing of my burnt hand. A helpful stopwatch, to see how far Manuela is taking me.

“Bit of a safety hazard, don’t you think?” I say, attempting to lighten the mood. Although I don’t think I would be capable of _lighting_ anything in here. “When’s the last time you got an inspector in here?”

I brace one hand against the wall, taking odd comfort in the fact that it’s still there, ( _Where else would it be, Martin? Keep your wits about you_ ) and let Manuela guide me down the staircase. She moves with a confidence that has me wondering both what percentage bat she is and how she’s letting out the echolocating screams without me noticing. But I guess you couldn’t work in a place like this without getting used to the dark.

“Our worshippers find it comforting,” Manuela answers serenely, guiding me around another corner she must have memorized by heart. 

“Oh, the pitch black? That’s what they find comforting?”

“You cling to your fabricated safety, the lightbulb on in the house to beat away the night, but the truth is, Mr. Blackwood, you’re just as lost and scared as everyone else. This city is full of secrets, dark and frightening and deeper than you can ever possibly hope to understand. You’ll never be able to truly know everything that’s out there, no matter how hard you work. It’s easier to just give in and stop trying.” Manuela squeezes my arm which has all the comforting power of a pillow being pressed over my face. “And once you do, you’ll understand the peace that comes from realizing you’re not alone in the dark.”

“Wow, where do I sign up?” I mutter under my breath, and I must be getting used to being in this church because I swear I can see Manuela smile even though I can’t see anything at all.

“We’re here.” Her hand slips down my arm until it’s gripped around my wrist and she guides me until I find the shape of a rounded door handle. It gives easily and I step forward into a room that might as well be a continuation of the hallway for how much detail I can make out. Which is about the same amount as dances I was asked out to back in my school days. Which is to say, none.

“I don’t suppose this room comes equipped with that newfangled electricity I keep hearing so much about,” I say with as much sarcasm as I can physically pile onto the words as I blindly step deeper into the room. Behind me, Manuela snickers. Well, at least one of us is enjoying ourselves.

“Records books are at the back. Numbered by year.” 

A frankly embarrassing amount of time passes before I remember exactly why I’m clenching my left hand into a death grip around a little metal rectangle. It takes a few fumbling tries to get the flame to start—I never could manage to pick up a smoking habit. Just too unreliable for it, I suppose. Plus a packet of smokes costs more than a frozen dinner and my stomach beats my nerves every time—but finally it catches and the room is dimly lit in a flickering orange outline. I’m almost disappointed in how ordinary it all looks. Just an old records room with shelves of books and binders over a desk in the back. It doesn’t look like it’s seen much use recently, I have to pick my way delicately around some cobwebs building up in the corners. The first book my hand lands on is five years too old, and then with a quiet sputter, my lighter dies.

I pull my thumb against the ignition and hear a click, a second, and then the flame bursts back into light.

I slide my fingers down the spines until I hit this year. I tug it off the shelf and let it collapse to the desk in front of me. A cloud of dust rises up from the impact and my thumb slips off the lighter as I bring my elbow up to cough into.

Click. Click. Click. And the lighter flares back up again.

I turn back to the book in front of me and begin to quickly flip through the pages. Apparently, reading by a lighter is more of a hassle than just the extremely dim pool of light it gives off. Every few minutes the flame would sputter out and I’d have to waste time getting it going again. I know I technically didn’t have a time limit, but every nerve in my body was on edge from being down in this creepy basement and I wanted to leave as soon as I possibly could.

Finally, I flip to the right page. March fifteenth. My heart nearly stops as I catch sight of a familiar name on the page, and I bring Jonathan’s lighter in close to the text so that I can see the entire sentence.

_If Gertrude Robinson is seen on the premises of the People’s Church, we must dispose of her by any means necessary._

My hand shakes a bit, casting the firelight around and making strange shadows. It’s hard to believe that on my first case I’d just stumble onto a signed confession, but maybe Ms. Montague was right. Maybe the People’s Church _had_ killed Gertrude Robinson. But this isn’t enough, I need circumstance, I need means, I need more evidence.

_The Ritual of Blackened Sun will commence at the stroke of midnight on the night of the lunar eclipse._

A charming name for a religious rite. But it places it on the fifteenth. My lighter fizzles out and I’m suddenly dropped into both the dark and the realization that I’m alone in this basement with the very person who might have pulled the trigger on Ms. Robinson.

Click. Click. Click. And the lighter turns back on. Its sallow glow is a small comfort, but I cling to it all the same. My eyes glance across the page.

_The eclipse has passed and the ritual collapsed. Every member of the church was united in prayer, Gertrude Robinson must have sabotaged us somehow. When we find where she has been hiding, we will ensure she cannot so easily ruin our next attempt._

Well now that doesn’t make sense. Ms. Montague said that Gertrude died on the fifteenth, and if the Church did whatever dark witchcraft they’re peddling at _midnight_ then Gertrude would have already been dead. And more importantly, they don’t seem to think she’s dead at all. If they’re telling the truth about this ritual involving every follower, then this might just be an alibi for the entire church. It’s not enough to convince me, but it’s something critical to bring back to Jonathan before we interview Father Raynor.

“Can I take this book?” I ask, turning back to the entrance where Manuela had stopped. It’s too dark to see that end of the room with only the dim puddle of Jonathan’s lighter. And then it’s too dark to see anything as the flame goes dead.

Click. Click. Click. Click. Click.

“Oh, come on,” I mutter under my breath, as I fiddle with the lighter and wait for doing the same thing over and over to have a different result. Maybe it’s out of fluid. Or the sparker’s fried.

“Ms. Manuela?” 

I reach out to grab the book I was just reading, but my hand goes straight through where I _know_ the desk just was a moment ago. My hand descends and descends into inky black void and this is the point where I’ll admit my stomach went from unsettled to full on panic.

“Manuela, I’m ready to go back upstairs now,” I call out desperately, louder just in case she walked back down the hallway, but there’s no response. The lighter in my hand might well be the only thing left in the entire world as far as I know. 

I grip it tighter.

“Okay Martin, stop acting like a lunatic.” My voice comes out shaky, but at least it gives me something to hold onto. “Desks and rooms don’t just disappear. You’re still under the church. You haven’t gone anywhere.”

All the faux confidence I’d mustered up in front of Jonathan is gone and I make my way to the other end of the room with my legs shaking. I can’t tell doorway from wall in the pitch black, but nothing stops me so I just keep walking. Had the room been this long when I first crossed it? Had I managed to aim right and passed straight back into the hallway without bumping the doorframe? Hadn’t there been stairs? Hadn’t there been turns?

The panic begins to get the best of me. I feel the nervous sweat soak straight through the back of my only good button up as I go from a stagger to a jog to a full on sprint, ignoring the complaints of my stinging ankle. I make turns wildly, hoping to eventually bang into something in the dark that I can use to orient myself, but there’s nothing. It just keeps on going. Forever and ever in the dark, empty abyss.

My head cracks into the door with an audible thud as I ram into it, but I’m less concerned about the headache and more ecstatic to find myself someplace with enough substance to actually be called a _someplace._ And what’s more, there’s a thin outline of pale yellow light all around the crack of it. Actual light. I’ve never scrambled for a door handle faster in my entire life.

The room is tiny, just on the big side of broom closet, with a single bare bulb painting it into a flickering dim that even still is almost overwhelming to my eyes. I blink against it to try and adjust, and that’s when I see the figure slumped on the floor. For a sickening second, I think the corpse is Jonathan, it has his long, dark hair and is wrapped in a red evening gown, just like the kind he was wearing today, but the skin tone isn’t right even accounting for necrosis. It’s pallid, almost greenish in the light, and dotted over with little holes that make my stomach turn over dry like a car engine that refuses to start.

I’ve never actually seen a corpse before. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do, report it to the authorities? Check for signs of life? I take a few steps closer and that’s when I see the body is moving. Not moving like alive but moving like ripples beneath the fabric of her dress, squirming masses of something horrible digging into her flesh and eating it from the inside out. Suddenly the holes make far more sense than I’d like them to. I wish I could say my professionalism as a reporter carried me through the realization, but the truth is that if I’d had anything in my empty stomach I would have lost it on the spot right there from the smell alone. Like week-old Chinese food sprayed down with cheap perfume, but more sour, and impossible to escape.

And that was before the corpse sat up.

And that was before the worm caught wriggling halfway inside halfway outside of her mouth by way of her desiccated cheek detached itself from her and flung itself directly at me.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: Nyctophobia, Trypophobia, Canon typical worms.
> 
> Gee whiz! That Martin fellow sure does seem to attract danger! Tune those radio dials to Blackwood Investigations next time to see how our gallant ginger gadabout gets himself through this one!
> 
> And if you find yourself with one of those newfangled internet tube computer boxes, you can find your dashing narrator at [@apatheticbutterflies](https://apatheticbutterflies.tumblr.com/) on tumblr. See you soon!


	4. Martin Blackwood and the Crawling Halls

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Extra c/w for canon typical worm descriptions

I honestly don’t remember most of how I made it back to my apartment.

There was a worm, a silver, wriggling thing like a flipped coin, twisting through the air and catching the light as it went, and there was the woman on the ground, dead in every way except for how she crawled across the rotting floorboards towards me, and then there was me. Stumbling backwards like a drunk tripping over his barstool as I rushed to remove my head from the trajectory of that _thing_ flying at me. In that three second slowdown, I swear my whole life flashed before my eyes. 

Disappointingly short, really. And disappointingly bland. As far as one word summations for entire lives go, _disappointing_ was pretty accurate for mine. I could hear the eulogies now. Luckily, I wouldn’t be around to have to suffer through my own sham of a memorial service.

I _felt_ the whip of wind as much as I heard it as the leaping worm flew just barely wide and I whirled around to dash away before my still-intact skin became unable to be described as such. Behind me, I heard a telltale squelching that I would hazard could have belonged to a decomposing corpse being lifted to its feet by a sentient colony of silvery maggots nested inside it, but I didn't turn around to check my hypothesis. The dark, endless void I’d been racing around in seemed to have vanished, maybe it left in a huff when it realized I’d found something new and scarier to run from. If Jonathan was down here with me he’d probably try to tell me it had never existed.

 _Pretty embarrassing to be so afraid of the dark at your age,_ he’d say, or maybe _being attacked by worms? Don’t you think you’re being a little bit melodramatic?_

But he wasn’t there, and I knew what I saw. This time, I finally knew exactly what I saw, and I’m not the kind of reporter who’ll just dismiss something because it’s easier or safer or less likely to throw the city as I know it into turmoil. 

(Personally? I think this city could do with a little turmoil. Maybe finding out that monsters are real is just the kick in the pants we need to finally _change things_.)

The tunnels I ran through were unfamiliar, and they didn’t seem like they belonged to the Church of the Divine Host anymore. For one, they were lit with buzzy white ceiling lights, and for two, they were round like sewers and concrete like sewers and had a sewage main running through the middle of them. You know. Like sewers generally do.

I grabbed for the first ladder I found and heaved off the manhole with that kind of strength you hear about mothers having when they lift cars off their babies. Would I have described my mood as hysterical? Yes. But I think I’ll leave that out when I write my article on this for the Thread. The world outside of the sewer was dark, and for a moment I felt my heart bump into my throat, but then I realized it’s just the normal kind of dark that happens when the sun goes down. Up and down the street I could see the comforting glow of street lamps, a few stores still open, and the zipping red of brake lights. Up above, the ever-present blanket of smoggy clouds were lit up a dull, silvery gray, and I took comfort in the knowledge that somewhere beyond them, in spite of all the rain in this dusty old city, the moon was still glowing just the same.

I considered heaving the manhole cover back into place to try and keep the worm monster from escaping into the streets but cowardice won over and I realized that would take far too long. So I hightailed it outta there like a gambler from his collectors and most of that is a blur up until the moment I had my back up against the inside of my slammed tight, tightly locked door, panting for breath so hard I thought my chest cavity might quit and look for other employment.

I give myself just one moment to enjoy the false sense of security of my own familiar house and the deadbolts Tim had helped me install when I moved out to be closer to the city. But then I remember exactly what I’m dealing with, and my brain goes to every single crack, vent, crevice—the leak in my bathroom ceiling, the mouse hole beneath the oven. I’m a sitting duck here, and there’s a thousand possible access points the worms could come through.

I spring into action. One attribute I have going for me as a reporter amongst the many, many qualities that I lack, is I consider myself a very ingenuitive person. Present me with a problem, and I can usually come up with solutions on the fly. They aren’t always the best solutions, but it’s often better to think fast than to agonize over perfection, and this situation is definitely one of those. I go for the linens first, taking every bedsheet and blanket and pillowcase I own and using them to line the cracks of my front door and the edges of my windows. I use dish towels in the vents and find an old plastic tarp to tape to the ceiling where the drywall is cracking. I fill the mouse hole with old socks. 

It takes a little over an hour, but by the time I collapse exhausted onto my old, corduroy couch I feel about as safe as I ever have living in this city. I haven’t seen any sign of the worms following me, but it’s better safe than chewed on and hollowed out by creepy crawling creatures, that’s what I always say. The day catches up to me very quickly, all at once, and suddenly all I can do is let my eyes slip closed and drift off into a dreamless darkness.

I wake up to a sound that I can’t immediately place, sort of a mix between a blender full of overripe bananas and hacky sacks being thrown against a brick wall. Maybe hacky sacks _filled_ with bananas. That would explain the rotten, wet, smushing sound they give out as they collide with the front door.

 _Oh. Right._ Those few moments of ignorant bliss bleed away just as my body lights up like a switchboard of pain. My brain can barely figure out what to focus on first—the odd-angled aching of my neck after sleeping slumped on the couch, the throbbing of my still raw and burnt hand I haven’t treated, or the stinging pain of the twisted ankle I ran on in a blind panic for over an hour as I made my way home. All of them seem secondary, however, to the realization that the worms from down in the sewer tunnels are outside my apartment, and as far as I know, they might be seconds from breaking in.

I depart the couch with about as much grace as a whale trying to tie its shoelaces, grab last week’s edition of the Thread to roll up into a makeshift club like a sitcom wife, and rush to the door, prepared to make my final stand at least valiant if not successful. Adrenaline is not a good long term motivator, however, and the panic begins to slowly ebb away as the hours tick by with the worms just as not broken in as they were when I woke up. Then my stomach growling ruins the last remnants of the tension, and I figure it’d be just as embarrassing to die while thinking about pancakes and how itchy my nose is as it would to be caught unprepared, and if I’m being honest? If the worms get in I doubt I could beat back the flood with a wad of paper anyway. I choose to face my death filled with breakfast.

After breakfast, and showering, and changing out of my sweaty clothes into something fresh, and bandaging up my burnt hand as best I can, the worms are still knocking at the door. I figure it’s about time to shift my perspective of this being an attack to being a siege. As far as I can tell, they aren’t burrowing through the wood, and none of the access points I stuffed up last night seem breached in any way. The worms seem more interested in letting me know they’re out there than they are about coming inside. That means I have time to make a plan.

First step, get some back up. I’m not really prepared to face some kind of crawling monster inside a woman on my own, especially armed with only the tchotchkes inside my house. All I have is a kitchen knife and a pair of scissors, neither of which are very sharp, and an old expired bottle of bug spray I have a sneaking suspicion would be about as effective as telling the worms they’re hurting my feelings. I get one hand on the phone on my desk before I realize I’m not sure who to call. The cops? Crooked. I’d like to think they probably aren’t on the payroll of a _worm monster_ but it’s an unfortunate fact of this city that I can’t actually be certain of it. And the conversation I’d had with Jonathan and Detective Hussein had made it clear that the department wants the truth of Ms. Robinson’s murder shuffled away under the bed like so much dirty laundry.

Jonathan. 

I don’t have his number. And I wouldn’t call him even if I did.

I briefly consider phoning Miss Cane and informing her that I won’t be making it into work, but I’d already put in for investigation time into Ms. Robinson’s case, so she wasn’t expecting me at the office anyway. No need to worry her unnecessarily. I wouldn’t be missed.

I waffle for a bit over calling Tim. There’s a chance he’ll rush over here in a fit of heroics and get jumped unprepared by the worm monster, but he’d probably disbelieve me long enough to properly explain the situation and figure out what we can do together. And Tim is just about my only friend in the city anyway, so he’s sort of my only option. But when I pick up the receiver, there’s no dial tone. The lines must be dead. I picture thousands of tiny bodies writhing through the wiring in my walls and then I do my best to stop thinking about that.

Time to figure out a new step one.

_Day Four - Rations Report_

_\- The leftover lo mein is stale but still edible_

_\- Milk went, had to pour it down the drain. The smell lingers, but I’ve yet to find a way to eat that_

_\- Four microwaveable dinners_

_\- Probably a week before the canned peaches run out_

_\- Two days before I go insane from the taste of peaches and bash my head in with a can_

_\- Half a loaf of bread_

_\- Checked for mold_

_\- Three times_

_I am going to be the first Daily Thread reporter to ever starve to death while investigating a story. I hope Miss Cane appreciates my dedication to the job._

The worst part of my impromptu incarceration was the extended one on one time I had with my own brain. It doesn’t like me at the best of times, and now, here, on the verge of death by malnutrition or murderous maggots, it’s like a constant slideshow of everything I could have done better to not end up in this situation.

That, and thinking about Jonathan. I’d come up out of the sewers halfway across the city, and for all I know he might have been attacked by those creepy cult members after I left and never made it home. I think about the glint in his eyes swallowed up into darkness thick enough to choke a man, and it sends a shudder right through me. 

_Stupid, Martin._ Why am I wasting my time worrying about him? He’s the prince of this city of sin, he’d probably scare the darkness away with one glittering white smile. Unlike me, he knew what he was getting into before he even walked into that church. Unlike me, he belongs in that world. My eyes catch on a glint of gold--Jonathan’s lighter is still sitting on my coffee table where I’d dropped it after running home all night with it imprinting an outline on my skin from how tight I was gripping it. I step around the arm of my couch and pick it up.

Seeing it now, up close and properly lit for the first time, I can finally appreciate the strange spider web design delicately scored all along the surface. A little gaudy, even for Jonathan’s decidedly gaudy sensibilities. Agnes’ declaration that she doesn’t like spiders floats, for a moment, through my head. It’s an odd commonality for Jonathan and I to share in common, but it makes him seem….oddly human to have such a casual affinity towards arachnids. Maybe it’s something I can bring up to him later, win a small bit of affirmation.

I flick open the lighter and try to ignore how pathetic I’ve gotten over a man who doesn’t even care whether I live or die. He knows I didn’t come back up from that basement, and he hasn’t come galloping in on his white horse to save me. To him, I’m probably just one more corpse in the sewers. Hard to imagine he’s losing any sleep over it.

The lighter flame sits there, steady and unblinking. A mockery of the peekaboo it played back in the church basement where it had flickered out entirely. I’d stumbled face first into some kind of mystic mumbo-jumbo and look where it had gotten me.

Who am I kidding? Even here, half delirious from sleeping sitting up in front of my door with a spatula clenched in my fist like the most ill-prepared general under the command of Captain Crunch, even here I know that the first thing I’m going to do when I get out of here is get to the bottom of this mystery. The world around it. The people, and their strange magic, and their rituals, and Jonathan, and Gertrude Robinson’s long-cold body at the center of it. Unraveling a story like this? It could change the whole city. It could change the _world_.

All I have to do is get out of here alive.

Somehow.

_Day Ten - Investigation Report_

_A Comprehensive List of Things Jonathan Bouchard CANNOT Tell Me Aren’t Spooky_

_\- Dead(?) woman full of worms_

_\- Basement that went on forever in the dark_

_\- Super hot glasses in Jude’s bar_

_\- Super hot Jude in Jude’s bar_

_\- Ms. Montague’s glowing eyes_

_\- Ms. Montague lighting her cigarette (Jonathan told me this was a parlor trick because he thinks I investigate with my eyes closed)_

_\- The crumbling ash cigarette Ms. Montague could hold fine_

_\- Rituals? What are they and who does them and what do they do_

_\- Jonathan’s lighter turning off faster but only in the spookiest basement in the city because the universe loves to torment me_

_\- Ms. Montague knowing the exact date of Gertrude Robinson’s death(?)_

_\- Everyone’s obsession with my job._

_Jonathan called me unaffiliated. Unaffiliated with what? The families?_

By the time I’m partway through the second week, losing track of days, and well on my way to developing a Pavlovian hatred of canned peaches, I realize there’s a bigger threat to my well being than worms or starvation.

Boredom.

Somehow, in spite of the tightly packed and well maintained barrier of sheets and towels crammed into every crevice of my apartment, the last of my marbles have exited through my ears and rolled off somewhere that I cannot find them. I drift around like a shattered mirror, cracked down the middle and unable to reflect reality except in broken shards and fragments at odd angles. Working on the case is the only thing keeping me centered, but I can feel my theories spiraling outwards in an ever-expanding mania that goes farther from the limited facts I know about this case and closer to wild speculation and conspiracy theory. At one point, I found myself blinking awake half-slumped over a page of my notebook entirely filled with a gigantic run-on sentence describing Jonathan’s eyes. I apparently found them “cloaked in shadows and smelling of mystery, yet lit from within by a cold evening’s bonfire of desire to reach the truth.”

It was rather poetic and deeply mortifying. I considered shredding it up and flushing it down the toilet, but backed up pipes would be the only thing that could make this nightmare worse.

I tried writing a will. Tore out the page when it started feeling like a laundry list of all the accomplishments I’ve never made. The blank spaces between the scarce possessions taunted me with voices that sounded like the ever-present squelching of worms. I really am going to die here, aren’t I? Maybe I could have broken free back at the beginning if I’d tried, but by now I’m worn thinner than a grease-soaked paper towel and fit to fraying at the edges. Some reporter I ended up being, I can’t even investigate my way out of my own apartment.

I start the will again. Tim gets my suspender collection. Jonathan gets my case notes.

_Day Fourteen?? - A Poem By M. K. Blackwood_

_The words I have written before_

_Were ants before lions_

_Were dirt in the grit of the cracks of the sidewalk_

_Were the packed and heaving heaviness of expectations_

_The words I write after_

_Are twisted potential to taste the rain_

_Are groggy light disproving dreams_

_Are the hallucinated yellow of a door to tomorrow_

_Are the_

I whip my head up from my notebook so fast my neck cracks. There, on the wall opposite my desk where I’m sure there used to be nothing but a wash of chipping, off-white paint, is a starkly yellow door. It would be easy to write off as a hallucination, I’m certainly sleep deprived enough, and a sunshine-colored, magical escape route certainly seems like the kind of fantastical possibility my brain would taunt me with. But well, even if it is nothing but a figment of air and desperation, it’s not like I have anything better to do. And if this is the end of the road for Martin Blackwood, I’d like to at least go out acting like the reporter I claim to be.

The wood is oddly warm beneath my skin as I press my palm to its surface. A sleeping dog, perhaps, stationary for now, but concealing teeth. But it is a door, and, after a moment of investigation brings no greater truth to light, there’s nothing left to do but knock.

Seeing a man walk out from the door is like stumbling over a pigeon in the middle of the Atlantic. Simultaneously mundane and yet so wildly out of place that it leaves my skin crawling just at the sight of it. The man is relatively tall, topped off with short-shorn blonde curls like a painter's rendition of the innocence of youth. From the outside, he looks entirely average—a chipper smile on his face, a striped scarf wound a few too many times around his neck before cascading down his back, a paunch around his stomach and hips that speaks of a sedentary lifestyle. Probably a desk job. I recognize the extra weight from all the extra time I'd had recently for staring at myself in the mirror and resenting the easy accessibility of the donuts in the Thread’s office kitchenette.

Yet, in spite of his apparent mundanity, every reporter's instinct I have—and a few instincts that are purely animalistic, the snap judgements that have carried our species through millennia of a world set out to devour us—is screaming that this man is wrong. Maybe it’s the way his eyes seem to resist my attempt to study them, sliding my gaze off to the side each time I try. Maybe it’s the way he'd walked through a magically appearing door directly into my office. Or maybe it’s the way that when my tired eyes unfocus just a bit, I see something wildly different beneath the casually commonplace office worker skin. Something long and twisting that echoes the twisting of my stomach as I try to trace out the lines of where hair meets scarf like a man who is quite sure hair and scarves are different, distinct entities. I am quite sure I used to be that man.

"Oh," the man says, his word the final sigh of laughter that had never existed. "I wouldn't do that if I were you, Reporter."

“You know me?” Probably an unnecessary question considering he walked into _my_ office. He must have a purpose for being here.

“I know a version of you,” says the man. “An impression of an impression of a shared associate of ours.”

Ah. “Jonathan.”

“He didn’t send me here, if that’s what you’re worried over.” The man steps past me, farther into my office and drapes himself over the back of my couch. He walks like a man, some six feet toe to the tip of his blonde curls. But, as much as he walks he also flows, like dripping magma that hardens as it spreads. And as much as he flows, he flickers, like bad wiring gone to the rats. “Unless you were hoping he did? I understand how transfixing the Archivist can be. Michael had the same difficulties.”

“Sorry, who’s Michael?” 

“Maybe he’s me.” The man shrugs the way I imagine a piano would shrug if it had the capacity. A slow arpeggio up and down through his whole body. “Or maybe he’s that sad, betrayed, puppy dog look in your eyes.”

“Jonathan didn’t betray me,” I say, but just the fact that the words were on the tip of my brain is a needle in the balloon of my willful ignorance. 

“Oh, of course not,” Michael says, clicking his tongue against his teeth with the unnaturally sharp sound of high heels on tile. “What did your Archivist do, simply mislead you? Bring you to the danger and conveniently let you lead the way? Ask you for help and send you deep into the labyrinth with nothing but a map and a fond pat on the shoulder?”

That final look of guilty hesitation in Jonathan’s eyes before I went into the Church basement plays through my memory like the closing credits of some mafia flick. He’d known what would be down there, hadn’t he. He’d known what we were getting into all this time. He’d let me burn my hand, he’d let me get swallowed up by the darkness, and now he was letting me sit here decaying, trapped in my own apartment, a future feast for the horrible creatures burrowing through my drywall.

Left me like a pining fool, with a useless lighter in my hand and my heart on my sleeve. Just another casualty of this city’s resident black widow. It’s almost impressive, the way he’d made me assume I might be special.

“What did Jonathan do to you?” I ask.

“I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting your new, lovely Archivist,” Michael’s smile grows dizzyingly wider. “Michael was devoted to his predecessor.”

“Jonathan had a predecessor?”

“Oh, yes, Reporter, the Magnus family would never be without an Archivist. The last one was so sweet, such a gentle old woman to be trapped in such a dangerous city. Michael, he pitied her. He _trusted_ her.”

His next words hit me like three gunshot wounds straight through the chest. “He was foolish enough to trust Gertrude Robinson. The Archivist.”

Realizations come collapsing down on me like a gallon of rain plummeting out of the murky city sky, slotting into place like puzzle pieces to reveal a picture I was too damn blind to see before. It all made sense now, didn’t it. Jonathan’s odd insistence on solving this long dead cold case of some woman he’d barely known. The way no one but me seemed to blink at one of the famous bigwigs of the city lowering himself to pounding the pavement for an old broad who’d been the enemy of everyone in his world. There was no secret heart beating underneath all that red silk and satin that sought the truth for its own sake.

Jonathan Bouchard was scared. Because whoever punched Ms. Robinson’s ticket might not be done mounting Archivists in their trophy room. And if they had it out for the Magnus family, Jonathan and his husband might be next.

It’s hard to reconcile the image of Jonathan, with his sultry eyes and red rouge lips, with the image the Thread had run of Ms. Robinson when she was first pronounced missing. She’d been a serious looking dame, hair in a tight bun, thick turtleneck, sharp blazer. Not exactly the type who’d look at home in the seedy backroom bars where Jonathan is said to do his best work. I hadn’t even realized the position was a legacy. Maybe the Archivist was just the title given to whomever Elias Bouchard uses to weasel information out of his rivals, and Gertrude and Jonathan simply had wildly different methods of information extraction. Judging by the reports of the rubble Ms. Robinson used to leave behind after one of her attacks, I knew which one I’d prefer to be siphoning out my secrets.

But Jonathan is just as adept as her at making enemies. And most of his enemies tend to leave their interactions _still breathing_. Maybe he’s right to be concerned. And if Ms. Robinson actually _did_ work for the Magnus family, the way this Michael character claims she did, then maybe her murder wasn’t actually about her at all. If someone was trying to send a message to Elias, would taking out his tool be good enough? Who would want to send that message, and what did Mr. Bouchard do with that information? Every revelation about this case only seems to branch into more questions. But at least now I have direction.

Direction I _could_ follow if I wasn’t unfortunately still stuck like a cat in a cargo crate, pacing uselessly around my apartment while I sink deeper into the water.

“Finally come up for air?” Michael asks as I look back at him, his blue, cherubic eyes sparkling with childlike mischief. “I was worried maybe I’d broken you. I have the tendency for that.” 

“Michael,” I say, trying my best to sound authoritative. 50% gumption, 50% pure desperation. “What did you come here for?”

“Why, to help, of course, Reporter! I’m always happy to cooperate with the press. And you and I are so very alike, I’ve been enjoying watching the show. It’d be so very boring if it came to an end here. Starvation is poor entertainment.” Michael throws his head back and laughs, curling over like a question mark, or a diver just on the edge of a jump.

“You can get me out of here?”

Michael reaches out and slides his fingers against my cheek. They feel like a bag of screws, solid and unnaturally heavy, but with something sliding around and unstable just beneath the surface. It takes most of the willpower I have left not to dart backwards like a squirrel from a firework. 

“Just follow me, Reporter,” Michael hums, the words flowing out like music. “What you need right now...is a door.”

Following his broad gesture, I look back to the unsettlingly cheerful yellow door that still sits in the wall of my office as if it had always belonged there. Nothing good can come from going through it, it doesn’t take a reporter’s instinct to know that much, but whatever it is it can’t be worse than staying here in this death trap and being eaten alive by worms.

At least, I hope it can’t be. I take a moment to treasure this time in my life where I can’t conceive of anything worse than being slowly eaten alive by worms, because a sinking feeling in my stomach tells me that the longer I pursue this case, the more impressive my imagination for suffering is going to become.

But I can’t just let it go. It’s not who I am.

“So tell me, Reporter,” Michael says, slowly swinging the door open. “Where would you like to go?”

The hallways beyond that door are indescribable, they slip through my mind even as I walk them. I wander like an amnesiac in his hometown, surrounded by what should be familiar but recognizing none of it. The carpet beneath my feet repeats in an endless loop like hotel flooring, the chipped-paint walls are lined with identical doors, the incandescent lights above me buzz out a single, unending note of static. If I try to focus on any one thing for too long, my eyes go fuzzy like a bad hangover, or a week without sleep. It’s all I can do to keep Michael in my sights until he stops abruptly in front of another door, exactly like each one that had come before. He opens it and, with a smile, shoves me out onto the street.

When I look back behind me, there is no door, only the busy hubbub of the early evening city.

When I look in front of me, there it is, towering over me in all its gray stone glory. The illustrious Magnus Library.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Crawling Creatures! Endless Enigmas! Is there no light at the end of the tunnel for our intrepid investigator? And what will he find when he finally breaches the walls of the Magnus Library—a friend? A foe? Or something entirely different!
> 
> Tune in next time to find out!
> 
> And until then, as always, dear listener, you can find your humble writer on that newfangled tumblr place [@apatheticbutterflies](https://apatheticbutterflies.tumblr.com/). Also, great thanks to EmeraldDaisy for her eyes on this installation of our chilling tale. Until next time!


	5. Martin Blackwood and the Man Behind the Mask

I didn’t come to the Magnus Library to confront Elias Bouchard. I know how it looks—I know how it’ll look to the future audiences of the article I’m planning to write which is wildly spiraling out of control—it looks like I found out the head of the Magnus family may have been the direct target of Gertrude Robinson’s murderer and went straight to ring his doorbell.

But you don’t survive in this city without having a healthy fear of everyone involved with the three big families. And you don’t survive period if you meddle with Elias Bouchard.

I was just here to use the library resources, do some research, and perform my best impression of an amnesia patient the entire time I was inside. Especially about anything concerning Mr. Bouchard’s alluring and very, very married husband. Who may or may not have left me to die in a pitch black basement full of murder worms. Which is the _actual_ purpose of my visit to their library.

I figure that even in a city with this much sludge lurking under the dusty streets, some mare with maggots where her guts oughta be should have pinged on one or two radars. You can’t exactly wrap a cockroach in a trenchcoat and expect no one to notice. People don’t tend to make eye contact around these parts, but we don’t live in a comic book. 

The Magnus Library is an impressive structure. It looks sort of like a malpractice lawsuit waiting to happen after some crazed surgeon sewed together the Parthenon and the USS Enterprise. The first three floors are an ancient Roman’s wet dream, all aged white marble and intricately carved reliefs and columns. Three different colors of ivy crawl up the sides between the evenly spaced windows, driving the air of academia into every passerby like an icepick to the eye. Up above the ancient structure, plopped incongruously on top, is a sleek glass skyscraper. It looks dead inside, the floor to ceiling windows black and almost invisible in their smooth reflection of the night sky. Far up above, lost in the ever-present smog clouds cutting our city off from heaven, is the penthouse suite. The supposed abode of Mr. and Mr. Bouchard. 

If there’s a light on up there, I don’t see it.

I make my way up the grand staircase leading to the glass entryway into the library. Even at this time of night, all the windows are glowing with a soft golden light and patrons are walking all about. Not for the first time, I’m grateful for the fact that I catch about as many eyes as a nocturnal bird catches worms. I probably look a sight after a couple of weeks of prolonged isolation. The worms never came up the pipes, but the potential for it was enough to keep me far away from the shower. I keep my arms firmly to my sides to mitigate the smell and move towards the far stacks as quickly as I can.

I decide to check the records first. It’s unlikely that anyone reported about the worm lady to a major newspaper publication, or the rumors of the story’s veracity would have pervaded the public consciousness a bit more than it seems to have. But a tabloid might be just the spot. Desperate enough for a juicy story to take an interview with a raving, unshowered loonie who had already been turned away by anyone who values journalistic integrity.

I shove the fact that _I’m_ currently that unshowered raving loonie to the back of my mind to keep Jonathan Bouchard company.

The Magnus Library may be owned and operated by a horrific, violent gang of criminals, but even I have to admit—it’s immaculately organized. They have microfilm of every issue of every publication dating back at least a century. I could slog through it all night and still have enough to last me out the week. So instead I focus on headlines, skimming through as fast as I can to see if anyone ever mentioned a sentient bug colony. A few hours and a pounding headache later, I’m no farther along than I started. Nothing about a man made of spirals and his endless hallways either. I checked.

I roll my shoulders back and crack my neck to each side. The newspaper angle is getting me nowhere. Time to change tactics. I push myself to standing, adjust my hat to cover a bit more of the sorry mop of my hair, and head off towards the front of the library. 

That broad with the bugs didn’t look like a recent convert, she was settled into that room down in the sewers. Nesting. There’s no way something like that just goes undocumented all this time. And everything that’s documented in this city ends up in the Magnus Library one way or another. It’s just a matter of finding it.

“Hi there,” I say to the bird at the circulation desk in my best impression of a pulled together gentleman who _isn’t_ fresh off a mental break. A polished golden name pin affixed to her cardigan says _Rosie_. “I was hoping you could help me find a section?”

“Of course, hun.” Rosie pushes up the half moon glasses balanced at the tip of her nose and smiles. “What section are you looking for?”

“Um,” I hesitate for a moment, trying to figure out the least suspicious way to phrase this request. “I’m looking for accounts of the supernatural. Nonfiction, preferably, if you have it.”

“Nonfictional supernatural occurrences?” Rosie lifts an eyebrow in perfectly manicured skepticism. I can feel my poorly knit together edges unraveling in front of her. “Do you mean cryptids? Local legends? Investigated phenomena?”

The stress I've been carrying in my shoulders collapses in gratitude. “Yes, that, exactly. That’s exactly what I meant.”

“Not surprising you couldn’t find it.” Her nails rifle through the card catalogue on her desk with a well-practiced ease. I can barely follow the flick of index cards before she stops and pulls it free. The string of letters and numbers listed on it don’t do me much good, I guess I skipped out on my education before we learned _filing systems_. Unsurprisingly, it hasn’t really hindered me in my day to day. 

“It’s down in the basement,” Rosie continues, pointing helpfully towards an unadorned metal door that I had always assumed was an emergency exit. 

“I didn’t realize you had a basement.”

“Special collections,” Rosie says and folds her hands in front of her primly. “They close to the public at midnight for preservation reasons, so you might want to hurry.”

I fumble to check my watch for the time before I realize that Michael tumbled me out of my office entirely unprepared. Not that I’m begrudging my own deeply unlikely rescue from what was almost assured to be an unpleasantly squirming grave, but I sure wish I’d brought my watch. Or my notebook. Or maybe a shot of mouthwash.

I scrounge in the pockets of my trousers and come up with only Jonathan’s damned golden spiderweb lighter. Of course. Essentials only.

“If I was you I would put that away before someone is forced by the specifics of their job position to tell you that no ignition sources are allowed in the Archives.”

I stuff the lighter away and shoot Rosie a guilty grin. She gives me the kind of smile usually reserved for very elderly dogs—caring but deeply concerned. I tip the brim of my hat to her before she can fall too far to either side of that spectrum. The last thing I need to do is cause enough of a scene in their library that Elias or _god forbid_ Jonathan hear I was snooping around. It takes a special kind of anxious soul to feel like they’re going to be reprimanded for _researching_ in a _library_ , but I am just that kind of talent.

I head for the basement.

Considering the prison style door they were concealed behind, the stairs down to the Archives are rather well kept. The carpeting is a soft, dark green with orange diamonds criss-crossing along it, and generous enough to disguise my steps entirely. The banisters are wooden, worn smooth from years of gentle use. People must be down here more than I thought. Who has so much use for a special collection? This city isn’t exactly known for a love of intellectual pursuits.

The basement itself is dimly lit but cozy. Dark bookshelves wait in silent rows, some lined in glass to protect the fragile tomes inside. Others look more like my office at the Thread, with piles and piles of brown file boxes filled with overflowing pages in no apparent order. As I step deeper in, the lights above me hum into brightness, ensuring I can see where I walk without exposing the books to any unnecessary strain. It’s somehow the exact polar opposite of that claustrophobic old records room in the basement of the Church, and I don’t even mean that in the way that it keeps getting brighter instead of plunging me into an impossible inky void. It feels welcoming, like it wants me to be here, opening its books and reading its knowledge. The Church of the Divine Host liked to pretend to be an open book, but here I’m pretty sure I’ll actually find what I’m looking for.

If only I knew what that was.

I compare the numbers on the card Rosie gave me to the neat brass plaques screwed into the sides of the bookshelves. I may not be familiar with library organization, sure, but as a reporter I pride myself on my observational skills, and I’m about as sure as a baby bird jumping out of the nest that I’ve never seen codes like these. Suspiciously esoteric? Too soon to know. Gertrude Robinson _had_ worked for the Magnus family, so I can’t imagine secrets related to her murder would be squirreled away in their own headquarters, but Bouchard has plenty of secrets of his own that he wouldn’t want to leave in the public eye. 

I find my section, and I don’t know what I was expecting but whatever my subconscious brain had conjured wasn’t this. The whole shelf is file folders, some thick, some thin, some with cassette tapes rubber-banded to the outside. For the first time, I wonder where exactly all those tapes piled up around Gertrude’s corpse came from. Had she been carrying them, or did the killer put them there as some kind of warning? It doesn’t make much sense considering the old bird’s body wasn’t even discovered for so long. Would make for a very inefficient message.

I pick up one of the folders. The top is branded with another long rambling string of numbers that mean nothing to me. Inside is a sheaf of handwritten pages, almost twenty, with a sharp black pen interspersing comments in the margins. Is someone in the middle of research down here? As if to answer my question, the silent, dusty air of the basement is cut through with a loud and throaty sneeze. I look up at the sound and find myself staring at a dark oak door, open just a crack. The nameplate is a matching brass to the ones on the bookshelves, as if it too is cataloguing its occupant. The lights above reflect off the shiny surface, and I have to take a step back to read the words on it.

_Head Archivist._

It feels odd to have been living in this city and frequenting this library for years and years and never even knowing the Magnus Library had an archivist. Well, aside from the obvious one, but I’ve always considered Jonathan’s codename more of a tongue in cheek nod to the kind of information cataloguing he handled out in the darkest corners of this city’s underbelly. An actual archivist wasn’t really necessary in a library, wasn’t that a job at a research institution?

I glance down at the handwritten pages in my hand and then back up at the door. Library or not, clearly _someone_ is doing research here, and I’d bet Jonathan’s fancy golden lighter that _someone_ is just beyond that door. Which is a real win win proposition considering I’d love to find an excuse to get the creepy trinket away from me. I’ve always been better with action than investigation myself. Sitting around and slogging through background research appeals to me about as much as an afternoon categorizing the lint in my pocket. I much prefer being up and on my feet, chasing something down, talking to people—turning over rocks and sharpening my angles.

This Head Archivist could probably explain the contents of this section in a third of the time it’d take me to slog through it all. And Rosie did say that the special collection closed at midnight.

The inside of the office is dim, the kind of dim that happens when you read by the windows until dusk settles in unwanted around you and you strain until the letters go black against the page to keep from having to go to sleep. Only here, in the Archives, there are no windows, only low-watt yellow bulbs humming quietly in the background. The Head Archivist has a light on his desk—the classic kind with the bent over brass body and the green glass head, the sort you only see at libraries or pool halls and nowhere in between—which lights up the mess of papers in front of him and leaves the rest cast into shadow. All I can make out of the hunched over man seated at the desk are a glint of spectacles, long hair desperately trying to escape from a messy bun, and a scowl full of teeth that catch the reading light as I swing open the door.

“I’m _busy_ ,” the man growls out in a voice that is equal parts smoke and mirrors, deep as a fresh grave and sharp enough to cut myself on. It’s commanding in a way that makes my nerve betray itself, that has my stomach backpedaling out of the room before my brain even has a chance to decide. But I’ve conquered mobsters and maggots, I’m not about to let a surly librarian stand in my way.

“Sorry to bother,” I say, because my mother didn’t raise a disrespectful pokeabout, just a reckless one. “But I was hoping you could help me with some research I’m doing?”

Whatever the man had been expecting to hear, it clearly wasn’t my dulcet, prepubescent attempt at standing my ground. He looks up so fast I worry about whiplash, unsettling the nest of cardigans he’s dressed himself in. A lock of his frizzy hair springs free of its brethren and tumbles down over his face. For just a moment, the lamplight glare on his glasses clears, and I get a clean look at those oil slick eyes I would know dreaming. No matter how much makeup he wears.

 _“Jonathan?”_ I can’t keep the shock from my voice the way I can’t keep my legs from buckling out from under me until I have to brace a hand on the corner of his desk to stay upright against my shock. I have no doubt that this is the same Jonathan Bouchard who has been pouring hot water onto the grease fire of my life the last few weeks, but I’m sure if I tried to convince you of that fact I’d wind up eating steak out of a straw from the beating I’d get for spreading lies.

The man sitting in front of me looks nothing like the Jonathan Bouchard I know, to a degree that cannot _possibly_ be accounted for by just a face of makeup and a distractingly low cut dress. The way he’s sitting, talking, the set of his jaw, the nervous patter of his fingers, the unease in the air. The Jonathan I know has never been uneasy in his life. He walks like he was born into six inch heels, with a stiletto knife instead of a spine. This man in front of me? He looks downright _fragile_.

“Please don’t call me that.”

“Your _name_?” I ask, though at this point questions feel almost irrelevant. Jonathan could say the moon is made of Swiss cheese and it would fit neatly into my new shattered understanding of the universe.

“It’s just Jon, here,” he says, itching at his arm. Like a person who has normal skin, like a person who gets _itchy._

“Right,” I say, nodding fast because I’m so lightheaded my skull might as well be full of helium. “You’re just Jon here. Just have an entirely different name that you come home to like some superhero alter ego. Right right, of course.”

Jon doesn’t even shrug the same way Jonathan does. He tugs his shoulders up jerkily like there’s ants under his skin. Like he could hide behind his shoulders. “That’s actually decently apt.”

“Okay.” I take in a long, deep breath the way Tim taught me the first time I was running up against a deadline. _Coffee’s only helpful to a point,_ he’d said. _Eventually you need to come down or you’ll lose your head._ “Okay. Explain.”

Jon screws up his nose and his pretty face wrinkles. “I just did.”

“No. No _way_ are you doing this to me again!” I slam my hands down on Jon’s desk and he literally _jumps_ in his chair at the sound of it.

“What do you mean, _again?_ ”

“I mean where do you think I’ve been for the past two fucking weeks, Jonathan?” I can see him tense up at the name but I’m not feeling particularly charitable at the moment. “I mean you abandoning me to walk to my death with only your stupid lighter that you _knew_ wouldn’t work!”

I slam the golden lighter down on Jon’s desk and the man must be a consummate method actor because he stares at it with a look in his eye like he’s never seen the hunk of junk before in his life. 

“What is that?” Jon reaches out and takes the lighter curiously.

“Oh what now? Are you going to pretend to swap memories when you swap secret identities?” I snap.

“I don’t—”

“That look you gave me when I came into your office.” I look Jon in the eye and he looks everywhere but back at me. “You didn’t think I’d make it out alive. I walked into that basement, to the dark, to my death, and you let me. You just stood there and _watched_.”

“I didn’t know _exactly_ what would happen,” Jon protests weakly, his words dribbling out of him like a balloon running out of air. “I didn’t know Jane would be there.”

“The worm woman. You _know_ her?”

Jon lifts his thick glasses and scratches beneath his eye. “We run in similar circles.”

“So monsters are real,” I say, feeling saner than I have in weeks. “And you didn’t think that was something you should tell me?”

Jon’s eyes dart away. “Jane Prentiss isn’t relevant to our investigation.” 

“She feels pretty relevant to me!”

“I tried to go after you,” Jon says, his voice suddenly quiet and plaintive. He looks up at me with those big, dark eyes and my traitorous heart just wants to trust him. “It was a moment of weakness. I just see so many people make so many foolish mistakes it’s hard to keep….I tried to go after you. But you’d vanished. And then I couldn’t get past Jane, so I just…”

“You wrote me off. Assumed I’d die.”

“Well,” Jon’s voice grows quiet and sad. “You’re only human.”

“And what, you’re not?” I’m halfway through rolling my eyes when Jon catches my gaze proper and the gravity in there drops my stomach through the floor. I push off his desk and stumble back a few steps until my back hits the wall of his office. “You’re not human.”

“It’s complicated,” Jon protests, which is far from a ringing self-endorsement. “It’s not like there’s a specific line. It’s like getting older, you don’t notice a change from day to day until ten years have passed and the time all hits you in one big moment.”

“Right,” I snap. “You just didn’t _notice_ yourself becoming a monster.”

“I’m not like them,” Jon says, his voice cracking like stale bread. “I don’t kill people. And I don’t… I try not to hurt people.” His jaw clenches, guilty. “Innocent people.”

“No, you just watch, is that it?” My mind drifts back to the rows and rows of file folders shoved up messily in the Archive stacks. “You just see what happens and write it down. Research it.”

“A record of fear,” Jon answers, dully, and he looks even more exhausted than I feel after a dozen sleepless nights under siege by monster worms.

“I feel a bit like a record of fear myself, after the short time I’ve spent with you.” I’m not usually one for picking fights, but it feels justified after the sheer size of the proverbial rug _‘Jon’_ has tugged out from beneath me.

“Welcome to my life.”

“So you would watch a hundred people suffer and die and do nothing, but as soon as one of your own is killed you launch a full scale investigation?” I lift an eyebrow and watch as Jon dips his head in shame.

“I couldn’t help those people.” Jon wraps his arms around himself and squeezes and his thin body is nearly obscured by the thick layers of shapeless knitwear hanging heavy around him. “But I could avenge Gertrude.”

I narrow my eyes and focus the last few bits of my suspicion and anger that haven’t been broken down by the miserable slant of Jon’s shoulders. “Is that truly it, or are you just some kind of all-seeing monster who can’t stand that you don’t know exactly what happened to her?”

Jon stares into the distance, miserable, like a rat in a trap. “I’ve let my position as the Archivist hurt so many, just this once I want to let it help.”

“Okay,” I say, and, like a cigarette that has been smoked to the last inches of its life, I crumble. “I’ll help you. But Jon?” 

He looks up at the sound of his name and looking into his eyes is just like the first time I ever saw him. Like they might hold the answers to everything in their depths. “It starts with you telling me the truth.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What a shocking discovery! Monsters roam the streets of our fair city, and the scarlet temptress Martin has found his life beset by is one of them! Not to mention the oddly anxious alter ego he hides in the safety of his library. What can our intrepid investigator do now that he knows the murder of Miss Robinson may have been magically manipulated by monstrous malefactors??
> 
> Find out next time on Blackwood Investigations! And as always, you can tune your tumblrs to [@apatheticbutterflies](https://apatheticbutterflies.tumblr.com/) to hear more from your humble narrator. See you then!
> 
> And special thanks to J_Quadrifrons for helping to edit our thrilling tale!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Let it be a tragedy of love and glory](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27995058) by [RavenXavier](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RavenXavier/pseuds/RavenXavier)




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